[Mageia-dev] announcing magpie

[Jerome Quelin]

On 11/02/02 16:33 +0100, nicolas vigier wrote:
> > Hm, for such seemingly trivial feature additions, wouldn't it make more sense
> > to just implement it in repsys..?
> 
> Jerome makes his scripts in perl. And mgarepo is in python. So it makes
> sense to distribute it separatly. And some of the features can still be
> implemented later in mgarepo if it appears they are useful to a lot of
> people ...

more importantly, those trivial features are designed to be coupled
later on. and this will be much easier to do if every action is
available in a module of its own...

eg, here are some other scripts that i have, intend to clean & port to
magpie subcommands:

 - update a perl module to latest version without having to specify said
   version. i already have sthg that works (for more than 2 years),
   which means that to update a pkg in mandriva i used to do:
        $ cooker perl-Foo-Bar && refresh
   ("cooker" command was the equivalent of "magpie co")

 - list all perl modules needing to be updated, grouped by core,
   dual-lifed or regular modules. i used to do the following to know
   which modules to update:
        $ cpan-old

 - order a group of packages to be rebuilt according to their build
   requires. this allowed me to rebuild ~2400 perl packages for mageia
   quite easily.

now, the grand plan for magpie is to integrate all those commands & then
to create a new subcommand that would automatically:
    - run cpan-old (magpie xxx to be created)
    - sort them according to their buildrequires (magpie xxx to be
      created)
    - for each of them, check it out (magpie co)
    - get latest version, update, build & submit (magpie xxx to be
      created)
    - wait a bit if needed (magpie bswait)
    - go back to step 2

now, you do understand that even if perl allows me to seemlessly call
various scripts written in whatever language (bash, python, etc), having
all subcommands sanitized and available as module will make all the
plumbing much more efficient, clean & maintainable.

oh - another thing. had i decided not to clean my collection of scripts
and publish them as a perl module, those scripts would still sit on my
computer and would not be shared. and i definitely think that it's a
good thing to share: it will allow people to help maintain perl packages
(and thus reducing my workload), not counting the fact that it may be
useful for other distributions too (*cough* mandriva *cough*).

hoping to clarify the rationale of magpie,
jérôme 
-- 
jquelin at gmail.com