Public SourceMage Discussion List

[flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>]

Ismael Luceno (ismael.luceno AT gmail.com) wrote [11.09.09 16:48]:
> El Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:52:45 +0200
> Remko van der Vossen <wich AT yuugen.jp> escribió:
> <...> 
> > My idea to address these issues is to split the grimoire along
> > various, flexible dimensions. Firstly, to address the first two
> > problems, I'd like to split the grimoire along a quality assurance
> > dimension. I'd like for us to have a core grimoire, which contains
> > the spells from basesystem and the spells we include on our ISO.
> > These spells need to work *at all times*, we need to have these
> > spells working properly to make sure that ISO generation can be
> > maintained without cauldron having to fix stupid problems everywhere,
> > they need to be able to concentrate on actually generating the ISO.
> 
> I agree that splitting the grimoire might be useful, but not in this
> case.

Having actually built said ISOs, and being the Cauldron Lead for several
years, I disagree with your disagreement. ;) Having separate grimoires
would be quite helpful for producing new ISOs, as a core grimoire would
inherently be 1) more stable 2) smaller and more minimal. This means
less to test for the ISO and a smaller final ISO size, both of which
contribute to how quickly new ISOs can be produced (as well as yielding
better final ISOs anyway). This is one of the main reasons why I argued
for split grimoires myself in our previous developer meeting.

> Splitting would be useful if we maintained the pieces separately,
> so we could have a very up-to-date but stable basesystem with the
> option to use either well-tested stuff or bleeding-edge.
> 
> Remember that 1) we need to separate stable from unstable stuff,
> and an version bump in any spell changes the category, and 2) there's a
> lot of interaction between spells that affect it too.

It's not clear how what you're suggesting is different from Remko's
original suggestions, unless you are arguing for having truly separate
grimiores (separate repos in addition to separate releases). There are
pros and cons for both separate repos and one large repo, but it's
possible to achieve the same end result via either method. In terms of
separation, if there is the additional metadata (QA, topic/branch, etc.)
then one could easily find all such spells via a simple find+grep
combination. Perhaps not as optimal as simply having a separate repo,
but Remko addressed a couple of the problems separate repos would cause
in his post.

> > That is the QA dimension of splitting grimoires. I'd like to add the
> > possibility to specify other dimensions. A topical dimension for
> > instance in which we can indicate all spells that belong to say X, KDE
> <...>
> 
> We could use section prefixes for that. Conventions are
> better/easier than configuration, almost always.

This is just plain bad. We have never had actual conventions for the
section names, so adding section prefixes wouldn't be a convention at
all. This would likely turn into the same problem as the KEYWORDS
issue. Additionally, how does one move spells from one QA to another? If
you will move the entire spell directory, then that's purely wasteful,
as spells will constantly move around as they change status, causing the
size of the repo to blow up for basically no good reason (compare a diff
of a single line change to an entire directory move of all files, which
occurs as a delete then add of all content). Linking might work, but
would likely turn out to be rather nasty because then a guru would have
to update the spell in multiple places (the original/actual spell
itself, plus wherever the links were).

Also, note that convention vs. configuration is a bit of a useless
analogy anyway, because configuration *is* convention. (And for what its
worth, there is *far* more convention in the content of DETAILS than in
the section names/prefixes).

-- 
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

Attachment: pgp3jPPAgoujj.pgp
Description: PGP signature