Hello Justin,

Wednesday, July 20, 2005, 10:17:17 AM, you wrote:

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JM> the one-off mass-checking is an interesting idea, alright -- I can see it
JM> being useful during rule development, now that you guys have outlined it.
JM> +1 on implementing something similar, as part of this.

JM> I still think the "sandbox" idea is *also* valuable btw as it provides
JM> good version control of rules, and allows in-development rules to be
JM> compared to the existing ruleset.  version control is *very* handy!

JM> I'd like to see if there's a way to combine the two somehow so that new
JM> SVN commits that update sandbox rules, are immediately mass-checked alone.
JM> However, I can't see a way to do that reliably from SVN commits alone,
JM> because (for example) meta rules may depend on other rules that were not
JM> changed as part of the same commit.   So I think the "email with attached
JM> rules file" is still a better model.

Agreed.  The email list method doesn't work well with eval/plugin
rules that need code change along with rule, but works great with meta
rules as long as you remember to include all the dependencies.  :-)

I'm all for the sandbox.  Since we each will play in our own local
sandbox, perhaps we can email rules from that to a quickie-mass-check
system like SARE uses, as a first-pass usability check.  When we then
commit *cf files to the Apache sandbox, then those rules get applied
to a fuller mass-check.

There's still a period of rule development where rules need a full
mass-check, but only once. If they don't work, they should be removed
and not mass-checked again.

Even rules under development that are work keeping and improving on
don't need mass-checks day after day after day after day.  There
should be some way to indicate how frequently/permanently a rules file
should be mass-checked. This should help reduce resource requirements
for the regular mass-checks.

Maybe filenames like 70.mc.daily.descriptionhere.cf,
70.mc.once.descriptionhere.cf, 70.mc.network.descriptionhere.cf, etc,
and the svn system pulls appropriate files into each night's
mass-check?

Bob Menschel



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