Re: [Monotone-devel] ikiwiki and monotone

[Chad Walstrom]

Brian May <address@hidden>  wrote:
> At one stage, Tom Lord (author of gnuarch) designed the structure
> for such a system.

Baroque is one word for his proposal.  The tools for working on the
bugs were not in place, IIRC, and required you to remember where to
move things once they were assigned, closed, etc.  The bug reports
were RFC-822 (Internet Message) files with special headers,
accompanied by an mbox file you could store email conversations in.
It was heavily influenced by the Debian BTS, which in turn took its
influence from GNU GNATS (or rather, that is my opinion).

GNATS itself also uses RFC-822 files as its database, and directories
that signify categories.  I hadn't thought of the possibility of
checking in these files into monotone, but it could work quite well
actually.  The tools for querying and manipulating the database are
already created, and I'm working on cleaning up the old code-base
some.

GNATS works either directly upon the filesystem itself, or can be run
through the gnatsd daemon.  We've been encouraging people to use the
daemon because of security reasons, i.e. isolation of system
permissions and GNATS account permissions, but in this case, using
direct filesystem access would be appropriate.  In fact, you could do
away with GNATS passwords entirely.  Changes would be signed by the
author in monotone anyway. ;-)

I recently added a command-line switch to allow client programs to
specify the "databases" file, which in turn tells the utilities which
paths to look for databases in.  It is now possible to use GNATS as a
personal bug database rather than simply a system-level service.

If any of you are interested in testing this out, check out the latest
CVS source code.  I'll try to roll out an alpha release tarball on
alpha.gnu.org this weekend.  There are a few things that must get done
before I can cut the final 4.2 version, such as fixing autoconf to
correctly recognize kerberos libraries, add in safe file creation for
indexes, and other fun things.  I would love to release it before
Debian goes into a global freeze state.

-- 
Chad Walstrom <address@hidden>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */