Wizard Autoinstall
==================

Wizard is a next-generation autoinstall management system with
an eye towards flexibility and scalability.  It is licensed
under the MIT license (you can view the license contents in
LICENSE).


Compatibility
-------------

This is Python 2.6 only!


The command package
-------------------

To add a new command to wizard, you need to touch the following
locations:

- bin/wizard
    Add a line describing your command in the helpstring

- wizard/command/command_name.py
    Implement your command there as main(). Copy the function
    signature and scaffolding from another file; it's non-trivial
    Underscores in the module-name are referenced using dashes.

As a command file, you're expected to have a main() and parse_args()
function.  Try to keep main() one to two page function that can
be browsed for a descriptive overview of what the command does
internally.  Use helper functions to create self-documenting
code.  Don't make helper functions for one-liners.  Place
all error classes at the bottom.


Notes for repository creation
-----------------------------

See documentation for full instructions.

- You are not going to be able to doctor a perfect repository
  from scratch.

    * If you have a simple change to a commit message, or
      something that you don't really need interactive control
      over (such as methodically rm'ing a file), git
      filter-branch is very superior.

    * 'git rebase -p -i' can be used to rewrite history interactively.
      Doing this will nuke any manual merge resolution you
      may have done (which may be a lot), thus, I highly
      recommend that you enable rerere (rerere.enabled = true)
      so that Git can automatically merge things for you.
      If the merge fails, you'll still have to reconstitute
      things manually.

    * You may want to consider using the Git sequencer, for
      which you can find a patch on the interwebs (I've never
      tried it before)

- The obvious scripts specific change that a new repository
  will have are the patches, but you should also check the
  autoinstall scripts if they do anything special.  In particular:

    - If it's a PHP application, it's probably inserting a php.ini
      file and creating symlinks to it.  Be sure to replace the
      appropriate values with placeholders WIZARD_SESSIONNAME
      and WIZARD_TMPDIR (Scripts)

    - You will probably need to generate relevant configuration
      files for each version using 'wizard prepare-config'


Design decisions
----------------

- A mass tool will plow ahead even if the subcommand throws
  Wizard errors.  Normal errors will cause us to halt
  completely.  If the error that occured is within the realm
  of possibly, and should be dealt with by manual intervention
  (or even possibly a code change), and would not cause harm
  if we continued going, we will keep going, and let the maintainer
  deal later on with the errors en masse.

  If the error is due to an error in our toolchain (and thus
  many installs can be fixed by fixing our end), we want to
  be able to re-run the mass tool with minimal fuss.

- We use the Google Python style guide.  See:
    http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/PythonStyleGuide
  However, we use 4-space indents, not 2-space indents.