Re: Patch for gnatsweb.pl

[Lars Henriksen]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 05:59:53PM +0200, Yngve Svendsen wrote:
> At 17:39 25.09.2002 +0200, Lars Henriksen wrote:
> >Do we want to (must we) keep backward combatibility? With gnatsweb 3.*?
> >With earlier gnatsweb 4 versions? As far as I can see from some bookmarks
> >produced by 3.113, compatibility with that version is already broken
> >(I have seen some "arrivedbefore=" or "modifiedafter=" query parameters
> >that are not recognised by gnatsweb 4).

Oops, got my version numbers mixed up here. Of course I meant gnatsweb 2.*
(not 3.*) and 2.9.* (not 3.113).

> While working with the recent "Sort By" patches, I had occasion to look 
> more closely at this. Compatibility with stored Gnatsweb 2 queries is a 
> non-issue I think. There are a few sites I know of that use Gnatsweb 3.99.x 
> in production (Dirk, this probably concerns you), but if we are ever to rid 
> Gnatsweb of this totally unnecessary level of complexity, this is the time.

Agreed. We use gnatsweb 3.99.3 (+patches) here, but until now it has
supported gnatsweb 2 queries--which I didn't realise until they stopped
working. I thought for a while that it would be possible to get rid of
field2param() entirely, isolate paramfield() to two or three places (where
query parameters are read) and keep backward compatibility. But I don't
any longer. The convoluted logic of submitquery() lives by the fact that
query_page() sets upper case query parameters while advanced_query_page()
sets lower case ones.

> I think I'll use my Supreme Maintainer Authority to decree that field2param 
> and param2field must die.

Fine. That implies that the query expression logic in submitquery() must be
corrected since it depends on case differences.

> Relevant patches are very welcome, since I have somewhat limited time to 
> code right now

I'll try my hand at some.

Lars Henriksen