This is seriously cool:
On June 8, three volunteers will be hooked up to electronics that will give them new sensory powers. For two days, they will adapt to life as a cyborg. One cyborg will feel magnetism. A second will “see” the world through a robot’s artificial eye. The third will sense metal objects hidden behind walls.
Yesterday I finally found time to wade through some of my outdated p5 ports. It is obvious that the monkey poo job of testing them with all three perls can be automated, but I never got really fed up with the procedure before. So I wrote yet another port-related automation script, which I’d like to describe here.
First, a little about my setup.
I use three jails for testing. There is a port58 jail which has lang/perl5.8 installed. There is a ports56 jail (with lang/perl5). And there is a j4 jail, which is a bit of a strange beast, since it is a 4.11 i386 jail (with system perl 5.005_03), so it took some tinkering to make that work on my 5.4 amd64 host system.
All three jails sit on a private subnet, and I can ssh -l root to them using my ssh key. They get populated with a freshly cvsupped ports collection via cpdup, a nifty little tool by Matt Dillon.
So, the manual procedure is basically:
The script to automate this task is called test-port. It is somewhat hackish, being a quick and dirty job, but it is usable.
Test-port makes use of other scripts, which I wrote over time and was using extensively, namely
build_mtree for creating an mtree of a jail.
plist for checking the current file structure against a tree created with build_mtree and generating a plist delta.
cpdup-port for copying a port or the whole port tree to the jails.
cpport for listing recently modified files (useful when committing stuff).
If you think you can have a use for those scripts, be my guest. If you make any improvements to them, I would like to hear about it — they do need improvements (in particular, they are not usable without modifications outside of my setup).
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