mini component distribution question

[Eric S. Johansson]

Serge Orlov wrote:
> How about one? I bundle everything together. Sharing modules at end
> user host is more difficult because you have to test many combinations.
> Needless to say, end users also have a strange ability to create
> untested combinations of modules :)

it's the exact same problem.if you make a change in one file that has 
compatibility problems with other uses than that one module blocks all 
upgrades on all other modules.

> 
>> I'd like to know if I'm missing something.  Mini modules management and
>> distribution should be possible without too much headache.
> 
> I organize projects in workspaces, where workspace consist of several
> projects pulled together from different source code repositories. And I
> also have small scrips to manage workspaces, for example, I don't use
> versioning system directly like "svn update" but run project specific
> update.py. If I want to share a mini-module I modify update.py not to
> update this module by default. So it works like this: projects X and Y
> share module C. Project X improves C and commits new version of C,
> which actually can break project Y. But since my update script won't
> fetch a new version of C by default, project Y is not affected. When
> project Y is ready for update, they run "update.py C", test, fix C and
> commit the fixed C. Project X updates C when they are ready to do it.
> Work like a charm for me.

I was thinking of something like that except I was thinking about what 
it would mean to have a script that would produce individual modules 
using the exact same template for all of the individual module files 
within a module cluster.  But then I started thinking that maybe it 
would be more appropriate to have a pull system.  Where you distribute a 
description file with an application and the application pulls a 
specific module version for its use.  That way changing a module 
wouldn't necessarily break it and the application developer could 
control which version of which modules it uses including the meta tag 
"latest".  It shouldn't be difficult either building a complete module 
template if you use some relatively simple form that "all" single file 
modules could work with.

on the other hand, I may have just reinvented parts of eggs.  :-)

---eric