Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@ieee.org>]

On Wed, Mar 31 2010, Joey Hess wrote:

> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>         Abillity to understand fairly simple shell script is not a
>>  matter of tenure. It is a matter of competence.  I am dismayed that a
>>  fairly bland invocation of find seems opaque, in your opinion, to
>>  people coming into the project today. I hope that is not indeed
>>  true. Personally, I find a small shell snippet to be clearer than a
>>  reference to a external program
>
> So, when I looked at your shell script, the problem was not in
> understanding it, it was in convincing myself that none of the 2 or 3
> possible bugs I saw in it affected it in the way it was currently 
> used in your packages, or could cause a surprise later.
>
> For example, it hardcodes excluding anything in /var from the md5sums.
> At the same time, it does not exclude conffiles, or anything in /etc.
> make has neither, but how, I wondered, could this code be used for
> something like tome, that does have files in /var, that need to be
> md5summed, as well as conffiles, which should not? Ah, turns out you
> have a different version there, that removes the /var exclude, and
> excludes /etc instead.

        Part of the simplicity of some of the constructs is that unlike
 helper tools, they do not have to be really all that generic. Though in
 this particular case,perhaps it is time to revisit my packages and see
 how I can improve the md5sum generation.

        Oh, I'd appreciate you pointing out the other bugs (perhaps in
 private email), now that you have looked at it enough to notice
 them. I'm always happy to improve my packages.

> (BTW, tome's use of /var/games for static game data smells of a FHS
> violation to me.)

        Hmm. Perhaps. Apex, bone, and save seem OK, the other
 directories could arguably be moved to /usr/share/tome.  I'll think
 about that.

        manoj
-- 
Aliquid melius quam pessimum optimum non est.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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