Re: Lessons from GIMPS (was Re: ANNOUNCE...)

[email protected] wrote:

> Non-unixen will have to use some other way of keeping up to date.  The
> perlhack man page outlines some of them, and it may be just as simple as
> ftp'ing a patch and applying it.

Instead of having a custom SmokingJacket for every platform, if we set
up the client in perl5 we're done.  D O N E done. 

What if Smoke Central was a static file, say

http://tipjar.com/kcpm/SC/daily.txt

and all the client has to do is:

	cd smoking_root_directoy
	wget -O daily.pl http://tipjar.com/kcpm/SC/daily.txt
	perl5 daily.pl

Trust/security is provided by the static file being in a known
place, which means that we are vulnerable to DNS-based attack, but
nothing easier than that.  The paranoid may run this whole
deal in a chroot sandbox containing the Minimal Required Stuff.

daily.pl would start with a big stack of unlinks and patches and
writes -- sort of like a sh archive -- and then it would go into the
build.



Are byte offsets the same accross platforms? if so, patches could be
in terms of offsets.  If not, we'd have to use lines, just like
the U<patch> program does.

Surely there are diff/patch workalikes in CPAN and diff and patch are
in the reimplementation project's library (whatever that is called,
I have never been able to remember it.)




-- 
                      David Nicol 816.235.1187 [email protected]
           .sig lines come and .sig lines go, but tenure is forever