[Fab-user] idempotency contrib

[Jeff Schwaber]

Hey folks,

I'm new to this mailing list, so apologies if I'm in the wrong place
or anything. =)

I recently rewrote my fabfile that I use for a bunch of different
projects, and noticed, as I was writing it, that I was doing a lot of
little stuff to try to maintain idempotency so that I could run the
script over and over when something went wrong. I thought it might be
useful to push that out into a library, and so I did so, putting it in
a module in the contrib directory in my fork of fabric. I haven't gone
very far with it -- I built Directory and Symlink objects, and started
work on a GitRepository object, since that's the majority of what my
fabfile code uses, but before I went farther, I thought I'd find out
what people think. The repo's below, and I'd welcome feedback on
anything you think of. One thing I might like to refactor is to pull
the tests out of the main test area and have a contrib test area.

In so doing this, the only code of the current fabric project that I
touched was the contrib.files code, where I added is_dir and
is_symlink along the lines of exists, and refactored exists so they
could all use some of the same underlying code. This doesn't change
the exists API, just adds the two functions to the files API.

https://github.com/freyley/fabric

Thanks!

Jeff