Re: [Monotone-devel] ikiwiki monotone support

[Zack Weinberg]

On Jan 13, 2008 9:41 PM, Brian May <address@hidden> wrote:
>     Zack> If you were interested in improving Monotone.pm to the point where 
> it
>     Zack> wouldn't be an embarrassment to the archive, I'd be happy to add a
>     Zack> monotone-perl binary package.
> Yes, I am interested. What needs to be done?

Fine control and sane defaults for how it runs the process, as you've
described, is the big absence.  A basic_io parser would also be a Good
Thing, and ideally there would be Perlish wrappers for every automate
command...

>     Zack> Incidentally, do you have access to Debian/alpha gear?
> Unfortunately not. I do have a Pegasos PowerPC computer though.

Rats.  It works fine on PowerPC.

> Does Debian have Alpha logins for Debian developers?

Yes, but I am not a DD, and the sponsor does not have the time to
track down compiler bugs.  (Also, in a former job I spent a lot of
time characterizing bugs in GCC, know perhaps too well how hard it can
be, and am reluctant to dump the task on someone else.)

> Yes, I suspect so. Probably need to allow setting at least --keydir
> and --rcfile (for the keyphrase hook). I am not sure what --confdir is
> for though - is it needed?

--confdir is the directory that defaults to ~/.monotone.  It's not
just used as a default for --keydir and --rcfile; for instance,
debugging dumps go there if it doesn't have a workspace _MTN directory
to put them in.

> No idea. It might be. Either that or it is empty (what happens in this
> case?).

If HOME="" it uses "" as the homedir (which may translate to "/" or to
"." depending on vagaries of path construction).  That's probably a
bug, it should fall back to getpwuid() if HOME is the empty string,
not just if it's unset.

zw