Re: [Chicken-hackers] Making chicken-install amenable to automation

[Timothy Beyer]

At Mon, 8 Jun 2009 13:07:49 +0100,
Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> 1) Fetch, which downloads a small number of files that can have their
> checksums checked against what's on file. This means the ability to
> get a specific version of an egg into a file. Now, the eggs manual
> talks about .egg files as being gzipped tarballs, but what
> henrietta.cgi actually outputs seems to be a different format,
> involving plain text headers. What's the deal there? I see that
> henrietta can be asked to produce a specific version of an egg, which
> is cool, meaning pkgsrc packages can target a stable version with a
> fixed checksum.

The non-versioned egg files makes adding chicken packages to FreeBSD ports a 
challenge, similar to the situation you describe on NetBSD.  (there was a 
special mirror noted somewhere in the thread "Egg filename versioning" by 
Leonardo Valeri Manera, but I don't think anything became of it)  The only real 
alternative that I can think of (which would be "versioned") would be 
subversion checkouts during the fetch phase, but I seriously doubt that any of 
the BSDs or any of the source-based Linux distributions can do such a task in 
an elegant or standardized way.

I'll take a look at henrietta.cgi, perhaps that could be a viable solution.

I do not currently have a NetBSD or pkgsrc installation at the moment, but I 
actually made my own ports on FreeBSD for most of the dependencies to hato, 
which I never submitted officially -- I gave up on the idea, and now I just 
build it with makefiles and scripts because anything that breaks a build 
whenever a third-party package is updated is going to be a maintenance 
nightmare...

The building steps aren't nearly as difficult, I often run chicken-setup 
directly on .setup files, but the problem as you noted, is getting the tarball 
and/or files in the first place.

I currently gather the tarballs via chicken-setup, and then install my 
modifications sing that method since I make a lot of small modifications to 
various eggs.

Thanks for your comments, you have put a lot of thought into this, a lot more 
than I have thus far.  I hope that I didn't take this discussion too far off on 
a tangent...

Regards,
Tim