[MiNT] Sparemint Site/Updater

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

Hey guys,

Just wanted to give a small progress update on the yet-to-be-renamed
sum.  Basically, since I replaced my linked list style data storage with
some clever use of sqlite, my interest in this project has been
seriously renewed (mostly because coding everything is within the realm
of my sanity ;) ).  

Sum has been packaged up and compiled for convenience (since nearly
nobody will be using a CVS windom).  It is available here:
http://storage.atari-source.com/atari/personal/package_staging/sum-0.1a.tar.gz

The GEM portion of this program is still more or less useless.  I've
done some work and made it run on N.AES again (there's Menu issues with
windom 2.x (CVS) and N.AES it seems), but there's basically no
functionality there.  You can run it in GEM mode just by
running ./sum.prg with no arguments.

The console portion is now DONE.  Sparemint Update Manager works by
pulling a list of packages from the server, and building a list of
packages on your local machine.  It stores these lists in a temporary
local sql database.  From there you can do several operations against
this data.

1. ./sum.prg info - this will show you the packages that are newer on
the server than your client machine.  It also shows you the packages on
the server that are OLDER than the what's on your client machine - kind
of a nice service to show what needs to be uploaded if you build
packages yourself.

2. ./sum.prg update - This is a LIVE updater.  There's currently no
dependency resolution, but this will be easy to bolt on later now that I
have a proper data back-end.  This function figures out what packages
need updated (based on the DEVELOPMENT sparemint server (out of date
right now)), confirms with you, and if you hit yes, it first downloads
these packages and then installs them one by one with rpm -Uvh --force
{pkgname}.  Sum successfully initiated an update of initscripts on one
of my systems..  Exciting ;)

3. ./sum.prg install {pkgname} - The use of this command is similar to
apt or yum.  It'll simply download and install the latest version of the
package specified.  ex. ./sum.prg install tcl -  I actually used this
functionality earlier for a real purpose ;)  Imagine my excitement.

The code is starting to look less interesting (read shitty) and more
useful.  Depending on the featureset you are interested in, we are far
enough along with sum to package it up into a release (disabling gem
mode entirely) and move to the new sparemint site.

So the question is... Can anyone spot anything that the sparemint
development site needs in order to be ready for "prime time"?  I know it
needs quite a bit of "polish" but I mean major features or documents
missing...  And what kind of time frame would we want to move this over.
Can rob host the php/mysql/packages?  The "polish" that the web content
needs i plan to finish in about the next week or two.

Thanks,
Mark