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  • From: Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • To: sm-users AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Users] menuconfig for casts
  • Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:34:56 -0800

On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 02:15:16AM -0200, Arthur Nascimento wrote:
> I did have to reconfigure xorg many times, but right now I am not sure
> they were on the same cast or not, I do believe they were. Even if
> they weren't, if they happened only on recasts, it is still a pain to
> do it. It really would have been great to just have all the choices
> remembered and change them at will on a non-linear way.

depends resolution only processes a spell once, its been that way for
a while, although, in releases as close as 2 years back there might have
been a bug. Since then, internally we keep track of what spells have been
processed and what ones havent so if a spell comes up a bunch of times,
we skip it after the first one. If for some reason you choose xorg,
xfree86, xfree86-4.3 in the same cast process each of them would ask the
'same' question since they're forks of the same ancestral spell. depends
of that sort default to what was choosen before, so that issue is harder
to accidentally trip. Also, the spell remembers your answers (to the
xorg build configuration), even though re-entering the menu doesn't
reflect that, the spell doesnt take the configuration and parse it back
to its internal representation before displaying the menu.

>
> Thanks, Andrew. Really. You actually made me look into the old book
> once more. I remembered the whole thing a little bit wrong. Luckily I
> won't have any more tests on that.
> Which reminds me: that is all very abstract and theoretical, not
> useful in day-to-day living and certainly of no use for Thomas, so why
> did you have to mention it? I mean, it really does not matter if
> sorcery is turing-complete or not, from any point of view, for anyone.
> Thomas had no way of knowing what that meant, unless of course if you
> explained, but I doubt you were going to if I hadn't intervened. So he
> was left at a disadvantage. Really, why? I was just helping a fellow
> frustrated sm-user in keeping up with the conversation, since I
> thought unfair the terms of the discussion. In this case I think a
> wrong explanation such as mine is better than none, specially since
> all that turing talk was really not needed in the first place. I did
> have in mind that I had forgotten most of what I originally knew, but
> as I said, better than nothing in this case.

The whole point of mentioning the notion that spell files are turing
complete was to illustrate that turning the scripts into menus on the
fly is hard. Compared with static lists, which are pretty easy to make
menus of.

Im not very good at reading people and how knowledgable they are on
something, part of it is email as a communication medium, i do better in
person and with people I know, and part of it is me (I will be the first
to admit my people skills are sub-par). So I took a guess rather than
going for a lowest common denominator (which over email I've found, can
sometimes make people feel I'm patronizing or insulting them, and thats
not my intention, ever). I guessed wrong, and for that, I do apologize.

Based on Thomas's subsequent emails it was fairly clear I hadn't delved
deep enough into things, and I choose the wrong abstraction level. I
hope my subsequent emails explain in more concrete terms what I meant.

>
> Thanks
> Arthur
>
> p.s.: I really am thankful for your explanation - it refreshed my memory.

You're very welcome, refreshed mine too :-)

-Andrew

--
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| Andrew D. Stitt | acedit at armory.com | astitt at sourcemage.org |
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