Re: [Chicken-hackers] Making chicken-install amenable to automation

[Timothy Beyer]

At Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:56:46 +0100,
Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> 
> 
> On 10 Jun 2009, at 9:40 am, Timothy Beyer wrote:
> 
> > At Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:53:47 +0200,
> > Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
> >>
> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >> Hash: SHA1
> >>
> >> Timothy Beyer wrote:
> >>> The non-versioned egg files makes adding chicken packages to
> >>> FreeBSD ports a challenge, similar to the situation you describe
> >>> on NetBSD.  (there was a special mirror noted somewhere in the
> >>> thread "Egg filename versioning" by Leonardo Valeri Manera, but I
> >>> don't think anything became of it)  The only real alternative that
> >>> I can think of (which would be "versioned") would be subversion
> >>> checkouts during the fetch phase, but I seriously doubt that any
> >>> of the BSDs or any of the source-based Linux distributions can do
> >>> such a task in an elegant or standardized way.
> >>
> >> If you have a user-definable fetch function (or abuse another phase
> >> for that
> >> purpose) than you can do svn checkouts in your packages. This is
> >> easy to do and
> >> supported in Gentoo. For example, you can install all of KDE-4 head
> >> from svn via
> >> packages if that's what you want.
> >>
> >> Anyway, everything that Alaric explained also holds for Gentoo.
> >>
> >
> > I'll retract that statement, I'm not as familiar with Gentoo as I am
> > with the BSDs.  Apparently it isn't even true for FreeBSD. (though
> > it's not really encouraged by the community).
> 
> Unless it's a special "developer package called foo-current", I'm
> leary of having packages build from svn/cvs/etc...
> 
I totally agree with you on that point.  It seems like a hack.

> After all, a package is meant to refer to a specific version of the
> software (that can be checksummed!). Yeah, you could check out a
> specific revision and then do a file-tree checksum - but it's easier
> to just create a tarball somewhere, which can then take advantage of
> the ease of HTTP mirroring and caching.
> 
> As it stands, henrietta.cgi will, if asked nicely, spit out a single
> file representing a whole egg at a given revision. See:
> 
> http://chicken.kitten-technologies.co.uk/henrietta.cgi?name=defstruct&version=1.1

Great!! I've been looking for something like this for a while!

> 
> I'm not sure offhand if chicken-install will take such a file from the
> filesystem and just install it, though! But the feature would be
> easily added.

I think it would need a few minor changes.  (for one thing, I think that 
chicken-setup requires gzipped tarballs, though I could be wrong...)

Tim