• TASK provide a means for exporting crucial environment variables into the Perl build script system
• BENEFIT allows hardcoded paths to be removed from build scripts in all repositories, so that they become relocatable to new machines
• COST do this in such a way that we resolve environment variable issues with running the perl build scripts from emacs instead of within the BOOT.BAT context
• RESOLUTION do this next
• TASK perform a test in BOOT.BAT for the existence of VS2008PRO, and abort on non-existence
• BENEFIT users probably need to have VS2008PRO to do much of use with the SACEMA projects being developed
• COST figuring out how this interacts with distributed execution of time consuming production runs or acceptance tests: should there be a separate version of BOOT.BAT which allows the system to run such tasks as don't need VS2008PRO without it being on the machine?
• RESOLUTION has quite a lot of interaction with what will happen to the PSE project: it might well be practical to reimplement PSE in Perl, in which case the system could pre-compile binaries on a machine with VS2008PRO and distribute them for execution on machines which don't have it. but this all very speculative, and depends on having access to such other machines. i've got more important things to focus on now.
• TASK install Mercurial 1.7.2 on www0.sun.ac.za
• BENEFIT to get changegroup hook to allow hg update to be applied automatically on the server every time the repo is pushed, so that we can make and commit modifications to the internal website on the client, and just push them to the server and have the visible website automatically update without
• COST this has to be installed from a source distribution and compiled. it implies preinstalling the latest python, which in turn may affect the setup of hatta wiki. (which should probably also be upgraded).
• RESOLUTION we should probably figure out how to do this properly (and update the existing wiki record of what needed to be done - for python, mercurial, werkzeug, hatta, and whatever else) so that these can be regularly upgraded from source to keep pace with developments. but in the meanwhile, i have applied the quick workaround of adding an every minute cron job which runs hg update on internweb...
• TASK find a way for BOOT.BAT to input the SACEMA password from the keyboard without it being echoed to the screen
• BENEFIT cosmetics, 'security'
• COST it seems necessary to write up a quick VC++ utility to do this, since none of the batch utilities i could find on the internet were adequate
