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sm-grimoire - Re: [SM-Grimoire] proliferation of *-cvs spells

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Subject: Discussion of Spells and Grimoire items

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  • From: "Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT optimaltec.com>
  • To: Grimoire <sm-grimoire AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Grimoire] proliferation of *-cvs spells
  • Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 10:56:17 -0500

There seems to be no agreement on what I'm advocating here so I'll try to elaborate. Having done spells that provide choice, I can say that they definitely require more effort upfront, and that they pay back in maintenance handsomely, at least for me. My second point is, the problems with CVS HEAD apps requiring CVS HEAD libraries is that such troubles are temporary and should not warrant a spell ideally. My third point is, if we do ten spells using single spell for all purposes, all in different ways done by different people, we might later converge on how it should be done, and move such feature into sorcery. So there's a chance of abstracting this stuff and making it easy and even more maintainable in the future.
These are my points. And BTW, some people seems to be using (and misusing) the voting signs such as +1 and -1. This code probably comes from Apache development team where +1 means full support and -1 means veto. Only team members get to vote though, especially if they use -1. So please don't scare me by using -1 where it doesn't belong. TIA! See http://httpd.apache.org/dev/guidelines.html (Voting section) for more information. There's no voting code in SMGL AFAIK.

Sergey.

Sergey A. Lipnevich wrote:

I would like to express my objection to proliferation of *-cvs spells in the grimoire. I don't like selecting between a normal and *-cvs spell, instead I'd like to cast just one spell and be prompted whether I want release or cvs version. *-cvs spells that are needed by other spells must carry PROVIDES and incur additional maintenance. In my sections, the only spells similar to *-cvs are php-dev and httpd-dev, which are still maintained for historical reasons, and php-dev is probably long overdue for deletion because nobody uses it, even I (we might need a php5 spell, but not php-dev).
Another example is the GIMP spells, stable and devel. I'd like to have just one gimp, and choose my options during the first cast. If I'm not happy, I can "cast -r" and get a prompt again.
Above all, I think it's less work to write CONFIGURE/PREPARE once, rewrite DETAILS/BUILD if necessary, and be done, rather than maintain hordes of *-cvs spells.
I'd appreciate everyone's comment on this.






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