Wendy, Juan Pablo,
On 27 Oct 2012, at 22:51, Wendy Liu wrote:
> 3) Browsing bundle contents
> I don't think the ability to browse the contents of all the files in a bundle makes much
> sense, it would be better to just show the description, index, license and possibly
> the HTML docs.
>
> The thing is, the ability to browse the contents of a file is already present, and I think it's more useful to have this feature present than to not, just in case someone ever wants to look at a file without having to download the package, so I would prefer to keep this feature. It's also handy if you ever want to link to a specific line in a file (when reporting a bug, for instance).
On 28 Oct 2012, at 07:19, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
> Thank for all the changes Wendy!
>
> I agree with your comment on "3) Browsing bundle contents"
The thing is that this approach seems to be just trying to replicate functionalities of a VCS.
If a VCS is what we need, we should just be using one.
For example any VCS I know already provides a web interface that allows to point at a single line in a file, eg.g.:
http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/11372/tree/trunk/octave-forge/extra/bim/inst/bim1a_advection_diffusion.m#l66
And it also provides many cool more advanced features like for example looking at previos versions and comparing two versions:
http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/11320/tree/trunk/octave-forge/extra/bim/inst/bim1a_advection_diffusion.m?diff=505e333171b75b10eb655d97:11319
Also, if "editing a bundle" means changing contents of a single file of the bundle, that this is not
something I think should be done via the web interface.
Bundle maintainers should just prepare a new release of the whole bundle, give it a version number and upload.
Otherwise there would be multiple "versions" of the same bundle in the wild, with different contents but with
the same version number.
You might think of avoiding this by incrementing the version number automatically whenever any change is made to any file, but then doesn't this sound like
replicating the functionality of a VCS again?
Anyways, thanks again to Wendy for all her great work!
c.
The impression I got from Jordi was that Agora Octave was meant to be a code-sharing site like Bitbucket/Github/Sourceforge but with a very low barrier to entry. So, similar to all the VCS-backed code-sharing sites out there, only without a VCS, to make it easier for people who aren't comfortable with them to use the site. So I pretty much am trying to replicate certain features of VCSes (or at least, VCS-backed code-sharing sites), but the intention is to do so without actually making the user use a version control system. It's not possible to just use the web interfaces themselves, because Agora is meant to be more than simply a web interface to a VCS, and even using certain parts of the web interfaces would be difficult due to language/dependency/other integration issues. (The plan is to get Mercurial integration working eventually, so that versions are tracked transparently with hg, without users having to ever create a repository or commit anything themselves, but this hasn't been done yet.)
As for editing bundles: I mentioned earlier in the thread that I would be scrapping this feature, based on feedback suggesting that it would not be a good idea. So users do have to prepare a new version of the bundle to update it, rather than editing individual files. Hopefully that clears things up.