Hello everyone, I am pleased to announce that an evaluation version of the distributed system for egg release management has now been implemented. This was done during the Chicken hacking weekend in Cologne, and thanks to the further efforts of Mario and Moritz this week, the system can now be taken for a test run. Please note that we are *not* committed to switch to this system at this point: We are just trying out to see how it works for our community, and if there are strong objections it can still be dropped.
For those who didn't follow the earlier discussions about this system, I'll try to explain how it works. You can find a more detailed explanation at http://wiki.call-cc.org/distributed-egg-repos Basically the idea is that you can now host your eggs wherever you prefer. This should make it easier for people to contribute eggs. For those who dig git, you can now use Github to host your eggs. Those who prefer mercurial can use Bitbucket. Even if you decide to write your very own version control tool and host it on your own personal server, you can still use that for developing your Chicken eggs. That's because the system is actually VCS-agnostic; everything is based purely on plain HTTP. Eggs are fetched either as tarballs, zip archives or separate files. Don't be afraid if you liked everything just the way it was, though! Chicken egg hosting in subversion is still supported and will continue to be supported. There's also very little change in workflow. There are two small things you need to remember when developing an egg: - There's now a new file called "EGGNAME.release-info". This file tells the new system what releases are available, and how to obtain these. This file needs to be linked once in a central list of available eggs when you first create a new egg (described below). - The "EGGNAME.meta"-file must now contain a list of files that should be present in a full download of the egg. This step is only required when you're using a code hosting method that doesn't offer a way to serve up release tarballs, though! This is currently the case for the Chicken eggs subversion tree. A cronjob on call-cc.org will automatically fetch all new releases that it finds, so that people can download them using "chicken-install" without requiring them to have all those different VCS tools installed. I've written up a tutorial on how to release eggs under the new system: http://wiki.call-cc.org/releasing-your-egg There are still a few rough spots; it would be nice if releasing an egg would be more automated (with a shellscript, for example), so you don't need to manually maintain the meta-file and release-info file. This will be worked on during the rest of this week. It would also be nice if people who are using other VCSes would take a look at the system and add descriptions how to use these VCSes with this system. We've already gone ahead and updated everyone's eggs so that the existing eggs still work with the new system without hassle. Only for new eggs or new releases do people actually need to do anything extra. For those who would like to test the new system, you can use the following on your commandline: chicken-install -l code.call-cc.org/cgi-bin/henrietta-cache.cgi kalaha This installs the egg "kalaha", which is a small game Moritz wrote. It's an egg that's _only_ available through the new system which we used to verify it actually works. It has two dependencies which are taken from the subversion tree, to prove that this also still works as before. To get an idea of how this works, have a look at Kalaha. Its release-info file is linked in the master list, here: http://bugs.call-cc.org/browser/release/4/egg-locations There we can see it's hosted on Github in the line (kalaha "https://github.com/DerGuteMoritz/kalaha/raw/master/kalaha.release-info";) The release-info file declares the available releases (currently only "0.1"), which can be fetched as a tarball by substituting the egg's name and release version in the supplied URI, giving us https://github.com/DerGuteMoritz/kalaha/tarball/0.1 which is indeed a tarball. This is cached on the call-cc server by henrietta-cache, the only new component in this whole scheme. Henrietta-cache is hosted at Bitbucket; you can get it at https://bitbucket.org/sjamaan/henrietta-cache Try to figure out how this was set up; it's analogous to how it works at Github. :) So, please give it a try and let us know how it works for you! Cheers, Peter -- http://sjamaan.ath.cx -- "The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music." -- Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
