Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:41:03 -0400 From: Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Mall now BSDCentral Message-ID: <200107100441.AAA19326@math.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:22:10 EDT." <200107100422.AAA16820@math.psu.edu>
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> The real solution is to define a little language for such maintenance
> tasks, and using that as the basis for installation packaging;
> something along the lines of Inferno's mush(1), which incorporate's
> mk-like dependency graph manipulation rules into a shell.
>
> This would make it easy to cleanly and elegantly automate all sorts of
^^^^ Whoops, that should be mash(1)
> system tasks; from updating configuration files from a common
> repository, to installing or upgrading the base system. It could also
> form the basis of something like Sun's jumpstart for FreeBSD.
>
> Instead, we have as you say a one-off program specialized to do the
> task, but in a non-extensible, and non-flexible way.
Oh, one should note that under Inferno, mash has bindings to Tk that
make building GUI interfaces very easy. These extensions work using
the native Dis module extension system, but a similar principle could
be realized under Unix via probing of the user's environment.
Unfortunately, the Tk bindings in mash(1) are not as complete as they
are for the normal Inferno shell (and Inferno's Tk is an independent
implementation which makes use of the underlying /dev/draw primitives,
anyway), but the approach is still valid overall.
- Dan C.
(http://www.vitanuova.com, http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/)
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