[Vampire-public] Several remarks about installation, help and features

[Nicolas Burrus]

About the installation
==============

* It is not possible to install vampire in a particular directory and run it.

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/vampire-0.2 && make && make install
$ /opt/vampire-0.2/bin/vampire.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/vampire-0.2/bin/vampire.py", line 26, in ?
    import misc, parserXMLconf, parserXMLtarball, FinalHost
ImportError: No module named misc

vampire.py cannot find the modules located in /opt/vampire-0.2/lib/python2.3/
site-packages. To handle this, I think the simplest solution is to generate 
shell wrappers, such as: 

$ cat /opt/vampire-0.2/bin/vampire
#!/bin/sh

exec /usr/bin/python2.3 /opt/vampire-0.2/lib/python2.3/site-package/vampire.py 
$@

This is what zope people use.

About the help and messages
====================

* Default options should be explicited in `./vampire --help' (ex: 
port=2811, ...)

* $ ./vampire -d
Vampire/home/lrde/stud/burrus_n/.vampire/hosts.xml: ##ERROR: No such file or 
directory

This message is not very clean (notice the leading "Vampire")

About the features
============

* I think an important features is missing (or I didn't find it).

I first explain the problem:

I need to check Olena on both netbsd hosts and linux hosts.
On netbsd hosts, I want to give the --without-broken-feature-on-netbsd flag to 
configure. This is not a host configuration directive neither a tarball 
configuration directive, I need a way to explain that when the tarball T is 
used with the class C, I need the flag F.

Maybe a way to declare class specific things into tarball directives would be 
enough, for example:

<tarball name="olena" class="from_cvs">
    <var name="MODULENAME" value="olena"/>
    ...
    <!-- Specific variable for netbsd, irix and macosX -->
    <var name="CONFIGURE_FLAGS" value="--without-broken-thing-on-netbsd" 
           class="netbsd,irix,macosx">

    <!-- Specific command for hpux -->
    <command name="echo I am happy to be on hpux" type=remote class="hpux" />

    <!-- Command for all classes -->
    <command name="./configure %(CONFIGURE_FLAGS)" type=remote />
</tarball>

What's do you think? Would it be difficult to implement?

* Is there a way to include xml files into others?
For example, it would be nice to have a standard tarball xml file with the 
default class, and include it into specific tarball configuration files.

* A summary log extractor in ascii
Having a summary log of what happened (just OK or FAIL) for each class in a 
text form would be handy to send automated emails after a check.

I hope I'll have some time to spend to help you improving vampire soon :)