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  • From: Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>
  • To: sm-users AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Users] menuconfig for casts
  • Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:12:34 +0100

Am Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:56:01 +0100
schrieb Vladimír Marek <vlmarek AT volny.cz>:

> Well, the answers in [ ] are remembered since you allready answered
> them. To force sorcery to re-ask you use cast -r (man cast)

I already answered a lot of other questions, too, where the answer is
remembered but is just placed as default in the still open prompt... (at
least I have the impression). As I said: I don't know the rule behind that.
If there is one.

> > allowed for them to do, what is possible in reality? Can one guarantee
> > a certain set of commands to be available to the scripts (sed, perl,
> > ...) even on a very, very minimal system? How far does the turing
> > completeness go in reality?
>
> Hmm. If you allow to run perl

I meant that the script wants to use perl but there is no perl installed in
this extremely minimal system - thus, the script is limited...

> > It should be possible to restore the state the spell's CONFIGURE
> > started in
>
> What makes you believe in that ?

Well, supposed CONFIGURE does not write and change stuff in the system:
Normally there is just a set of stored variables to delete... but that is
what I think and it has already been shown that what I think is not
necessarily what is the case in SMGL.

> Well generally no ( you can create whatever you want in your local
> grimoire, after all ). The only think I can think off is that the cast
> is supposed to work even unattended, there are timeouts for each
> question. I'm not sure how would you do that with menuconfig style ui.

Simple: The default answers are there, too - of course. And: Ever seen a grub
or lilo menu timing out and just doing boot of the default entry? I admit
that I didn't work with dialog scripts yet; but even xmessage has this
feature.

And for the unattended argument:

I'm preparing a workbox for a friend. Base install and rebuild done. He is
_no_ Linux freak and needs to do some TeXing. So, I bluntly tried

cast tetex kdebase

and went through many, many questions. Then went away; in other words: let
the cast continue unattended.
Result: Quite some of the pulled-in dependency packages were installed, but
19 packages were dropped (among these tetex and kdelibs) and 9 encountered
problems:

jadetex failed because don't know: no compile log there
gtk+ failed because X not there
tk failed because of many compile errors ... somehow looks like assumed
to have some X headers. Interesting that this doesn't fail when th header is
not found but instead manages to produce many parsing errors with the
non-defined stuff.
qt-x11 because cups test failed (cups was selected but dropped)
xdvi because no X (another circular one: X pulls jadetex for docu and this
puts tetex in front of X on the row)
arts because of no X (why the heck does a sound daemon need X?)
lesstif of course because of no X
aspell spreads some fear because of an internal compiler error (segmentation
fault) in line 1016 of common/config.cpp
pyrex failed - and that's a good one! - because python is not there (was on
the install list)! Another circle closed.

Gazing at the activity I note that there were some failed summons, too
(notably tetex and espgs). I'm trying to find out why...

This brings me a bit down to the ground concerning more user-friendly
configuration. It's a bit more important that sorcery does something against
these circular dependencies! It may be extreme to try such a generic cast as
I tried, but it should work, nonetheless.

What about sorcery making a minimal build of such stuff as xorg, tetex or
espgs first and the full build with options later to resolve the loops? The
minimum should be that it at least detects the loop and warns me about it.
Somehow this comes back to the point configuration being (turing-complete)
programs and no parsed definitions - I suspect that circular dependencies can
be produced without sorcery being able to know about them in the
question-answer stage.

Also, even without circular dependencies in the game, it is strange to be
asked if I want to install package X three times if three packages in one
cast optionally depend on it (but ok, it's only cosmetics since the question
would remain and just be changed to "use X?"). But what if I say 2 times
"yes" and "no" the last time? Will X be cast?

Sorry for the ranty end, but I'm a bit annoyed by this at this late hour.
It's especially discouraging because I find other aspects of SMGL so cool. To
be fair, though, I'd have to try a `cast kdebase` without touching any
options to see if the default choices avoid the circular dependencies.


Thomas.

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