[MiNT] New Sparemint Site

[Mark Duckworth <mduckworth@atari-source.com>]

Hello guys,

I've begun the construction of the new sparemint site in PHP/MySQL. 
Right now, it will be at http://devmint.atari-source.com.  Nothing is
there yet, but very soon stuff will start showing up.  The live
production site will be at http://mint.atari-source.com, but this will
surely move to the atariforge servers or wherever.

These are my decided ideals so far:
* The sparemint site must have separate repositories such as: standard,
standard-testing, 060, 060-testing, gcc3-060, gcc3-060-testing, and
minimal, minimal being a system built with older low memory consumption
pacakges designed for ST machines.

* Automatic package submission.  New packages will be submitted via the
website.  The packages will be put into the testing repository of
whatever primary repository.  Once 3 users or something like that mark
the package as tested and working, it will move into the primary
sparemint repository.

*MySQL Database storage of metadata, this can be accessible, exportable,
etc for other users to use in other projects relating to sparemint.

*Automatic package builds.  I intend to implement a system where users
can submit a spec file and a tar.gz of all files needed in
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ and my falcon will build the package for that
user and return the srpm, rpm or errors to the user.

*All prior package revisions are saved.  Starting the time the system
goes live, users will be able to revert to packages starting at a prior
date.  Users will be able to use the downloader to download all packages
that would be available at X point in time, similar to CVS.

*An automatic update client similar to apt or yum will be built in C or
some other low overhead language (not perl, php or python) that can be
used by users or cron jobs to interact with the sparemint site
automatically.  This client can also be used to submit package approvals
and stuff like that.

The way I see it, is that there are several hundred CT60's, Hades, etc
out there in use.  If a fraction... say 30 people use this site, then
the code is worth it.  I don't know how much abuse the current sparemint
site gets but I know at least 15 people at different points in time have
worked on the sparemint site.

I intend to get things setup eventually so that users can submit a
package for standard and the srpm will be downloaded to my falcon and
rebuilt for 060 optimized flags, etc.  It will be very interesting when
it's all said and done, but I definitely think I'm going to need some
Atari horsepower..  Be it aranym or 060 procs out there to do some
compiling.  It's a shame you can't cross-build rpms easily.

Let me know what you guys think.... :)

Overkill?  Or do you like these features and want more.  If so, what
features?

Mark
http://portal.atari-source.com