Discussion of Spells and Grimoire items

[Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>]

Using a / is better.

I was thinking:
- Top-level scripts were common to all spell, eg, DETAIL (description, 
website, maitainer, etc...) and maybe HISTORY.
- stable is current stable spells
- test is current test spells
- cvs is cvs spell
- devel is unsupported and may not even exist
- bin are pre-built binaries. I have spells to install binaries of 
thunderbird and firebird I download from mozilla. I don't think they 
should be z-rejected.

But these have to be thought out carefully, see why below.


There are two issues:

1. The grimoire would get very large. So we would have to look at how to 
reduce the size of the updates. One possibility is cvs or subversion, 
but someone metioned this can take a toll on servers.

2. There may be too much work in maintaining all these version. Similar 
to when we had three grimoires (Stable,Test,Devel). BTW, I think only 
two grimoires are working well. One possibility is two make it known 
that we only support the stable, test, and cvs versions of the spell. 
But will they listen.

On that note I would vote this be a post 1.0 iso release, because we 
have something that is working well and I view bugs and stability as 
more important.

Though, we can try out things in the meantime. Between, fixing bug.

Duane.

Andrew wrote:
> I like the way this has gone, I'll venture a few comments.
>
> First if we are going with these composite spells, i suggest we dont
> use a dot (.) as the seperator, we may run into problems later... I
> think we should use a / instead, that could even make the sorcery scripts
> slightly simpler, and it is a more natural boundary. By using a dot we are
> essentially reduplicating work that directories already abstract for us.
>
> cast gimp/cvs would try and cast the cvs version of gimp, and all the
> files would be still located under
> $GRIOIRE/$SPELL/
>
> if we set gimp/cvs to our spell variable. I hope thats somewhat clear. The
> disticntion seems more natural and less prone to future problems than
> using a - or a .
>
> Also, I think that the base spell should be current 'stable' release
> (whatever that ends up being). Then all the sub-directories (assuming
> Duane's idea) would be optional, but common ones could be cvs, bin and
> devel. Whichever ones exist could be a function of the software and
> spell maintainer's willingness to support the cvs/bin/devel versions.
>
> If we go for things this way, then we can have the best of both
> discussions. A common and understood way to have both regular and cvs
> (et al) spells, packed into a single 'composite' spell. We can still have
> provides/requires stuff for the spell as a whole, or the cvs version if
> that needs to be the case.
>
> The question then is, do we go for a sorcery feature request before or
> after the 1.0 iso release? Is there a feature freeze right now?