As I work on the changes for the next official release of the lilyCore code, I work by first making changes on a test core (which is a snapshot of RPI's). Once I think I have a set of changes working fine, I then install those changes on the official RPI core. After running on that core in production for awhile, I transfer the changes to a separate core, which is the "core DB for the next official release". That core has only one user and two discussions (-admin and -newuser), for instance. That's where files like lily/core/lilyCore.db-2.8beta3.gz come from.

Because of this, I am constantly being hit with the problem of moving changes from one core to another one. It's not much fun for me, and I'm only propagating a mere week-or-two's worth of work at a time. And when I'm making good progress on a series of changes, it would be pretty painful to propagate two months worth of changes from one core to another.

Right now I use a script called splitcore.rb (which I wrote) to take a complete MOO db, and break it out into readable text files. That helps a lot when it comes to comparing verbs, but it doesn't help enough when it comes to comparing properties. If the properties are different between two different cores, you have to look through every single line of the changes, and figure out if the value for a given property changed because of some actual coding-related change, or if it changed simply because the two sites have different values for that property (such as "max discussions a user can own"), or if the property is just constantly changing as time moves on (such as "last input time", or "time of last checkpoint"). It is very tedious.

So, I'm writing up what I plan to do to improve that. I don't expect to solve all these issues for this upcoming release, but I want to improve things enough that the next release should be much less painful for other sites to upgrade to than this release will be. I do not expect that this release will have a full-blown alternative to $transfer . I just want to make it easier to compare to cores and tell which property-changes are important, and which ones can be ignored.

-- GaranceDrosehn - 06 Dec 2005
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