Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: FAI patches and feedback

[Aaron Bentley]

David Allouche wrote:
> How would you call it? There is already a "fai export" command.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it?  The shell behaviour is meant to be a 
fallthrough, not the main behaviour.

> There are other annoying behaviours caused by not-quite-sh behaviour.

Sure.  The question is how far I should go in emulating sh.  Too little, 
and it's annying to use.  Too much, and I'm duplicating effort.

> For example "help | grep foo" is not correctly parsed as a pipe,

When I want to pipe within fai, I just prefix the command with 'fai'. 
But this also suggests that we need an apropos command.

> and you
> cannot no longer use the kind of ugly one-liners you could use in tlash,
> for example:
>
>         mirrorv `upstream` ; library-add `upstream` ; missing-from
>         $(latest-revision `upstream`)

Since mirrorv isn't a Fai command, I'd expect that to fall through to 
the shell.

> where "upstream" read the contents of the `tree-root`/{arch}/+upstream
> file used by the pqm submission script. That one line was useful to
> monitor the application of a merge request.

If it's something you do at all often, you can make it an external 
command.  It looks a lot like revisions --missing-from, too.

> Probably the policy is that in fai you should not have to write one-
> liners... I'm not convinced that is a good policy. Some kind of non-
> trivial command language is useful. And please, not something with
> bracketitis :)

I'll think about it.  My main focus is on avoiding those cases in the 
first place.

> I will look more at the internal design and FAI and RAW before making my
> mind.
>
>
> > The Doxygen documentation is obsolete.  Epydoc is the replacement.  For 
> > user-level stuff, there's the README and the web site:
> > http://sourcecontrol.net/~abentley/fai/
>
>
> I also tried to generate the epydoc documentation but had trouble with
> that too. It refused to import most python files in the local directory
> complaining they were not python modules. I'll write the makefile if I
> manage better the next time.

Odd.  I'll look into that.

Aaron

--
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.