[Dirvish] The future of Dirvish

[Richard]

Yes, I know....I hiijacked the topic...   BAD RICHARD!

Dave Howorth wrote:
> Loren M. Lang wrote:
>   
>> <snip> It looks like dirvish-expire does not expire images in the right order when all
>> images have expired.
>>
>> # dirvish-expire; dirvish-runall
>> cannot expire server:default:20080423 No unexpired good images
>> server:default 20080424 2008-04-24 02:04  +28 days == 2008-05-22 02:03
>> <snip>
> Looking at the code, I tend to agree. It appears to sort in increasing
> order of date - as confirmed by Loren's output - but it treats the first
> one as special - again as confirmed by Loren's output. Especially
> interesting are the *two* warnings about the sort order!
>
> I haven't done any testing but at first glance this does look like a bug
> to me.
>
>   
What is the status of dirvish version 1.3.1?  The website still lists it 
as 'experimental' and not ready for production.  I tried to look for a 
changelog for 1.3.1 and I seem to be going in circles on the website.    
OH!!!  ok.. I downloaded the 1.3.1 tar.gz and looked at the changelog in 
there.    Hmm... 1.3.1 seems to be approaching an age of three years old.

I've been looking through my copy of old list messages searching for 
what I seem to remember as a topic concerning setting up testing 
procedures and possible bug reports.    AH  here they are!     Back on 
4/6/2007 -> 4/9/2007, Eric Wilhelm and JT Moree were discussing testing 
procedures for dirvish.  JT came back on 5/24 and offered up some 
utilities that he suggested could be used as a basis to get a full 
testing suite for Dirvish.

It would be nice to see an updated 'stable' release that includes some 
bug fixes and some of the other suggested scripts that have made their 
way across the list such as Paul's dirvish-image-sizes.pl script.   That 
utility/script is ABSOLUTELY AWESOME for calculating the actual disk 
space in use by each image.  Of course I changed the sort order in the 
version that I use, but I understand the sort order originally provided.

What can I do to help the project along?  I'm not good at programming, 
but I can help document, provide input, and test -- which I will do by 
installing 1.3.1 here shortly.

What about setting up a community or member edited FAQ that can get 
updated with questions from the list.   Maybe a faq-o-matic ?

On a side note, I did find an old message from Keith dating back three 
years from next Sunday stating:

"You haven't seen much from me, I've spent the last 6 weeks on a 
death-march-from-hell consulting project. Paid very well, and in about 3 
years, everyone here will own a copy of the product we are designing. 
I'll tell more when permitted"

Were you ever permitted, Keith?  Is 'the product' nice and shiny with a 
fresh clean taste?



-- 
Richard