[lokisetup] patches in the 2.0 series...

[Stéphane Peter]

Le dim 16/02/2003 à 08:07, Ryan C. Gordon a écrit :
> I tend to bitch about loki_setup approximately 24 hours after any given
> ut2003 patch, I know, but here's what I'm thinking currently.
> 
> We need to change the way we do patches with setup 2.0.

I agree with what you are saying. The current way to do patches is not
very practical, error-prone, and artificially increases the size of the
patches.
 
> First, they should _not_ be self-extracting. This has caused no end of
> trouble and suffering due to glibc issues, etc on loki_patch. Plus, if
> something external handles extracting, we can guarantee that a) md5sum is
> available (as part of the extraction program, not an external utility) and
> b) bzip2 decompression is available (we're more or less forced to have
> bigger, gzip'd patches at the moment...EVERY time I put out a tarball
> some server admin goes "what do I do with a .tar.bz2 file?!" and some
> systems STILL don't have a standard bunzip2 binary on them).
> 
> Second, the patch program should not be included with the patch. When the
> patch breaks because of this, the only answer is "tough luck, kid"...or,
> "here, rip the patch apart and add these files and rerun it and clean up
> afterwards...wasn't this so user friendly?" Also, including the same
> binary with every patch makes the thing unnecessarily bigger...moreso if
> there are multiple architectures that the patch applies to.
> 
> So...
> 
> loki_update should do the patching itself once it downloads the patch
> file...or loki_patch should be part of loki_update. Patches should be data
> that the tools work on, not packages themselves.

I'm thinking we should move the relevant code to handle patches to
setupdb, so that it can be linked in with any program like loki_update.
Then one would only need to install a single package to be able to
perform any updates.

By the way, megastep.org was wiped off the surface of the Earth for a
couple of days, and I know I missed some email (including from this
mailling list), so if anybody here tried to contact me unsuccessfully
since Wednesday or so, please try again (and register.com sucks ass).

-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.