Re: Some little proposals...

["Germano Rizzo" <manomano ciaoweb it>]

Hi! :)
    what I want to say is that not everyone is skilled enough to use CVS, or
rsync... and as far as I know (but I could be wrong), CVS need a consistent
uptime... thus sending to /dev/null, so to speak, all the advantages I
wanted to point out!
    I don't know if an automated update tool would be a good thing... I
think yes, but outside there it's plenty of such tools, one could just add
the needed functionality to an existing one... IMHO, what it should do is...

*keep a database of the versions of the packages that a user has
*check for patches, and download them
*_optionally_ apply them to the tarballs... one may want to keep an older
version!

the rest should be up to the user, IMHO. Sounds rude, but it would be what
*I* need... the problems are others: that not every package, and not every
release update, has a patch... this is the major thing I wanted to point
out! And I think something can actually be done!! Update tools should be
quite easy to write... the real trouble is that everyone accepts to create
the patch!

it wouldn't be so difficult to find a 'standard' path to follow for this...
for example, if we have a program called foo that is upgraded from 0.1 to
0.2, one can do

cd foo-0.2

make distdir

tar xzf /<a path>/foo-0.1.tar.gz
or
tar xIf /<a path>/foo-0.1.tar.bz2

diff -Nur foo-0.1 foo-0.2 | bzip2 -c > foo-patch-0.1-0.2.bz2

and distribute the file. Worth 2 minutes, and you can make a script that
does it...

This is what I do with my GnomerMind... of course, during 'unstable' devel,
there could be changes that patch can't handle; but once the package is
stable, they shouldn't be so frequent...
    Bye bye,
        Mano :))

PS: have a nice weekend!

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GnomerMind - an intriguing puzzle
             game for your GNOME!
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http://gnomermind.sourceforge.net
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