[Fab-user] Re: Fabric

[Jeff Forcier]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 8:27 AM, Christian Vest Hansen
<address@hidden> wrote:

<big snip here -- thanks for the reply!>

> I currently have two git repositories; one on nongnu.org and the other
> on github, and I'm manually keeping the two in sync. Even though the
> nongnu repo is declared the "main" one, I think it is easier to do
> collaborative development on github.

Agreed. I'm pretty sure Git lets you define a post-update hook which
could be used to remove the need for manually pushing from nongnu ->
github -- I just spent a few minutes Googling and didn't find anything
simple-n-easy, however. Let me know if there's anything I can do to
make collaboration easier, in terms of branching/commit
granularity/etc.

> This is a troublesome subject. For instance, get this: with "rolling"
> fab_mode, commands run in parallel, while operations run serially.
> [...] It would be possible to add a third mode that runs the
> commands in serial, but doing so would require a refactor of how this
> mode system is put together - which isn't an intirely bad idea, but it
> will probably take a little while to get right.

Interesting -- I haven't read all of fabric.py yet, which is why I
jumped to conclusions upon seeing the word "rolling" :) Good to know
the current state of things.

It sounds like you understand the intent of the functionality I'm
looking for, so let me ask you -- am I crazy? On occasion I'll find
myself wanting to do X, where all existing implementations of a given
program seem to only offer Y, and much of the time I find that it's
because X isn't really the right way to approach the problem after
all.

However, being able to execute non-simple logic on remote systems
sounds, to me, like a natural evolution of what Fabric and Capistrano
currently offer -- i.e. going from a simple series of imperative
commands to a setup involving logic. I recognize that such an
evolution is nontrivial from the perspective of the underlying code,
but I don't see any obvious failings in the desired functionality
itself...?


At any rate, I'll continue reading over your source so I know how it
all works, and possibly tweaking things here and there as I go. I am
also thinking of writing some simple API-like documentation that goes
beyond your tutorial, just to help myself get a handle on what
commands Fabric currently offers to end users.

I tried running epydoc, but Fabric-the-module has a number of public
functions that seem effectively hidden to users of Fabric-the-program
(and thus the resulting "API" had a lot of stuff end users would not
care about), so I think a manual document is best for now.

Regards,
Jeff