Resource configuring

Hi all,

I've been upgrading to Ark2 on a linux box of mine and have hit a few 
difficulties in the process.

I pulled down the sample1 team and followed the web-page on trying out 
ark. However, the sample1 team is very much geared towards a sandbox 
approach whereas I wanted to deploy stuff into the "normal" sidai areas 
(/our, /usr/local). I tried just hacking the configs and the script in 
the obvious places and this worked for OK, but not well.

[I was thinking that for the mini-launch it might be handy to have a 
complete sidai-like team. I'm willing to offer my own as a starting point 
when(/if?) I get it all working. Even better would be to have some 
auto-setup stuff. I think Harlan has been working on this for hosts? 
Forgive me if I've missed what you've been up to Harlan, I've not been 
following the list closely.]

I added gcc to my team and installed it, but to my chagrin found that it 
wasn't being used by any of the builds. On looking more closely I noticed 
that the sidai linux prototype sets all of the various resources to the 
standard RedHat locations. I can understand the idea of using the 
pre-installed versions where you have them, but doesn't this also jar 
with sourceism?

I taped some of the ALL prototype onto my team linux prototype to fix 
this, but it made me think about the whole boot-strapping process. Could 
we replace all of the various *_BOOT resources with something that checks 
to see if you've revealed a particular package? e.g.:

     ALL.xml
     -------
     <CC>
     <string>@team:ark-dirs:OUR@/bin/gcc</string>
     <constraint><dependency type="optional" name="gcc" /></constraint>
     </CC>

     ia32-rhlinux.xml
     ----------------
     <CC>
     <unless package="gcc" status="revealed" />
     <string>/usr/bin/gcc</string>
     </CC>

Is there already a mechanism to do this? I'm not sure if I've expressed 
this very well, but basically find a way to specify where to find a 'x' 
in the absence of having installed our own. Then you can safely just use 
@host:CC@ wherever, including building gcc. One problem I can see with 
this is that since the ia32-rhlinux spec shadows the ALL one, doing a 
reveal with max deps won't know to install gcc. But this was the case in 
the original form and I'm not sure how to fix that.

Ho hum. Now to get back to trying to build Python 2.1 ...

:-j


-- 
jonathan hogg, one good idea ltd, 131 queen margaret dr., glasgow g20 8pd
http://www.onegoodidea.com/ tel:+44-(0)7976-614338 fax:+44-(0)7970-537451