Re: Diverging applications

["Christopher Murtagh" <..hidden..>]

On 9/12/06, David Tangye <..hidden..> wrote:
> The .pl scripts in bin/mozilla
> are all different files. Furthermore some files in the root and
> bin/mozilla have the same names, but they are not clones of the same
> file.

 No they're not, but the all of the bin/mozilla/[a-z][a-z].pl files
are the same file in bin/lynx (well they used to be, Chris cleaned
that up a bit by making the files in bin/lynx simply require the
bin/mozilla ones).

> I dont know more than that, just stating what is obvious to me. It
> **looks** like a hackers mess, but there will be historic reasons for
> it, even if the reasons are irrelevant today.

 Yes, it is somewhat of a mess. At the moment the work that I'm
proposing doesn't change any real flow of the code, just re-organizes
it so that it's a bit simpler and cleaner.

> My view of SLMB right now is :Go for it, change as much as you want. No
> pain no gain right now. If anything breaks it should be relatively easy
> to fix while few if any production systems are on it - I know mine are
> not yet. Its probably worthwhile knowing when anyone starts putting true
> production master data onto it (not production-image/-clone/-test) and
> until then, go like hell and hack away while not constrained.

There are definitely people using it with production data now.

> >  For custom scripts, I will create a custom directory, and provide an
> > upgrade script from the current setup to the new one. Custom scripts
> > are currently of the form 'bin/mozilla/custom_am.pl', and will become
> > 'custom/am.pl'.
> User installed 'plugins' of some type, eg custom shell? perl?

At the moment this isn't new functionality, it's simply re-org'ing
something that's already in place. We'll probably allow for more
interesting customization later with a better thought out API.


> >  For user based custom scripts, they will also go into the custom
> > directory, and simply be called 'username_am.pl'.
> Would (LSMB)/users/bin/ be a logical directory?

Well, there's no reason for /bin/ in any paths, it doesn't add any
clarity and makes the file system structure more complex. There could
be an argument for having a /users/ and a /custom/ directory, however
in the current functionality it doesn't add much, and it conflicts in
that there's already a /users/ directory (which will be going soon too
I hope). Perhaps with the new API we can do more creative things.
Right now, my goal is to cleanup and simplify before adding new
things. This will make it a lot easier for us to determine when will
be the time to jump to the other side.

Cheers,

Chris