Comments sought on #23179: Automatically wrap spkg-install scripts with boilerplate

[Erik Bray]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on my proposal in
https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/23179 . Although I don't believe
this is absolutely necessary to do, I'm increasingly convinced it's a
good and useful change to make, and I would really like to have it in
place for my ongoing work on improving the sage build system [1].

In short what I'm proposing is that the source copies of the
spkg-install scripts (under build/pkgs/*/spkg-install) are not
executable. Instead, they are only marked as executable when copied
into an actual build directory, at which time they can also be wrapped
in common boilerplate. This is helpful in the effort to reduce
duplication and boilerplate in the spkg-install scripts.

One downside to this is that it means assuming spkg-install scripts
must be shell scripts. This assumption could be worked around with
some additional magic, but it's easier to just use the spkg-install to
wrap any non-shell code one might want to use (e.g. Python scripts).

Thanks,
Erik


[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/nTwhCV89FXE/_7GdzGy4BgAJ