Re: [Chicken-users] [wish list] chicken-install: show available eggs, upgrade all installed eggs?

[Stephen Eilert]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 7:06 AM, Felix
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello!
>
>> It would be good to be able to show available eggs when installing an egg, 
>> such
>> that user can grep and find wanted eggs quickly without having to browse at
>> http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg- index-4.html.  Simply a text 
>> dump
>> of that html page would help much.
>
> That is possible, but would require a regularly updated "master" document 
> somewhere
> on our server.

Henrietta already provides a list of eggs to chicken-install. I
suppose that could be used, if we don't care about showing egg
descriptions in such a list.

>
>>
>> The other feature is being able to upgrade all installed eggs after, for
>> instance, upgrading chicken.  Then i don't have to reinstall each missing 
>> one by
>> one, desperately.
>
> That has been requested repeatedly in the past, but I'm
> sceptical. Bulk updates like that make it extremely easy to break
> everything, unless you have a very rigid control over the stability of
> the currently available extensions.  The egg repository is actually
> pretty good in that regard, but still, broken eggs and broken
> dependencies slip in from time to time. We are quick to fix those, but
> something like a bulk update could easily result in broken
> installations.
>
> For example, I may have several applications that use one or the other
> installed egg. Those eggs may be out of date, but I'm more interested
> in having my system running, so when I install new extensions,
> "chicken-install" will warn me when an egg requires higher versions
> and I have the choice to think twice about whether I want to do that
> or not.

But only if you already know which versions you are supposed to be
using. For deployed code, I guess you could take the list from a
running server, manually. For code sitting in a repository, it doesn't
work like that. Even when you do know the versions, it could get
tedious.

However, you've already provided the solution for that, your 'overrides' :)


--Stephen

Sent from my Emacs