Aschwin Marsman wrote:

> > Today I have started using the CVS repository at SourceForge. You
> > should be able to checkout the "Exec" module, which is the Recipe
> > Executive. See http://www.a-a-p.org/download.html for more info.
>
> This works, thanks. For updating, only cvs update in the Exec
> directory is needed, when you've already checked out a version.

Yep, that's easy.

> > I'm currently working on making it easy to upload to the CVS repository,
> > avoiding the need to type all kinds of magic commands and URLs. Soon
> > uploading should be as simple as "aap upload". Actually, this already
> > works for existing files, but I also want to automatically add and
> > remove files. That makes it work just like packing the files in an
> > archive and distributing this.
>
> cvs commit is not enough?

That doesn't add new files or remove old files. The recipe I'm using
for creating the .zip archive already contains a list of all the files
that are to be distributed. I want to edit this list only once, it
should also be used for CVS. This also makes sure the zip archive
contains the same items as what is in CVS.

> > Having read part of the CVS documentation reminded me how complicated
> > this is for distributing software. I'll also try to think of a simple
> > way that just uses files on an ftp or http server.
>
> When you are used to it, it's no problem.

I think it's still a problem. Example: When I imported the A-A-P files
to the SourceForge CVS server, after reading their documentation, I
discovered they had been put in "Exec/Exec", thus one directory too
deep. Think I could quickly fix this, I made another mistake and ended
up with the "Exec" files in the top directory. The third time I did it
right, the "Exec" directory had the right files.

Now, I can delete the files from the wrong directories, but I can't
delete the empty directories. On a local system you would bypass CVS
and do this manually. The SourceForge CVS server doesn't have shell
access, thus I had to submit a support request (which was handled in
only a few hours, thankfully to the SourceForge staff!).

Not only did this show there are still things you can't do with CVS, it
also shows it doesn't have a proper "undo" mechamism (that's not the
same as rolling back versions). And it's not too difficult to make
mistakes.

Add to that the magic commands and options and URLs you have to type,
and you quickly decide to make a script to do this stuff. Or at least a
shell alias.

> I'm having problems with gettings Exec to work.
>
> I'm running RH 7.3, which installs the following for Python:
>
> $ rpm -q python
> python-1.5.2-38
> $ rpm -q python2
> python2-2.2-16
>
> The scripts look for python, which is python 1.5.2 ;-(

Hmm, I think the program currently requires Python 2. I might have an
attempt to make it work with Python 1.5 again (later). I'll check to
see if it's possible to detect the presence of python2. However, this
won't be possible in the scripts that start with
"#!/usr/bin/env python". Unless someone knows a trick.

> Finding help gives:
>
> $ ./Main.py -v -help
> Traceback (innermost last):
> File "./Main.py", line 96, in ?
> main()
> File "./Main.py", line 48, in main
> i18n_init()
> File "./Util.py", line 39, in i18n_init
> gettext.install("a-a-p")
> AttributeError: install
>
> I haven't done anything with Python yet, so it's probably easy to fix.

This really requires Python 2. The gettext support wasn't very good in
1.5. I could detect this and skip the gettext support for 1.5 to work
around this. Until running into the next problem...

> Maybe a FAQ for problems like this is a good idea.

It's mentioned in the README.txt file.

> What are the dependencies of the project?
> Which tools have to be installed in order for letting it work?

Just Python 2. And I haven't tried it on anything else but Unix, thus
it probably doesn't work on MS-Windows yet.
Obviously you need an "scp" command to be able to use an "scp://" URL for
":copy".

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