[Gnump3d-users] Upcoming changes ..

[Steve Kemp]

  In the three years and 11 months since I started working 
 on this project there have been a few major changes, and
 a few minor ones.  (Some of the code in the project is great. 
 The rest I wrote ;)

  Yesterday evening I spent a while cleaning up the code
 of gnump3d-top to make it into something that I would write
 now, rather than code I would have written a few years ago.

  This was a slow attempt to get to grips with refactoring
 and simplifying the entire codebase with an aim to add
 new features and really cut down on a lot of redundancy
 and bad decisions in the past.

  As part of this work there will be the possability to
 do some things that couldn't be done in the past.  For
 example there have been two recurring requests for pretty 
 much the entire existance of the project:

    1.  Foreign language support / Translated themes.
        (I'm going to translate *nothing* myself, but making the
        ability available to users is definitely a good thing.)

    2.  Multiple root directories.

  The second I regard as a minor thing, since there are many
 approaches to solving the problem outside the code.  (.e.g.
 symlinks, "mount bind", junctions, etc).  But I do have a plan
 for implementing it.

  The first is something that I started working on and then
 got sidetracked.  As things stand the *interface* served via
 your browser is English, but the messages the server shows
 upon the console may be translated.

  This is clearly not what people want.  I think people would
 actually settle for English messages upon the console *if* they
 could have localised interfaces via their browser.

  So it is time to change.

  Last night I sat down and started planning a big migration
 of the existing themes, to use the Perl HTML::Template module
 and a new layout.  Since it is now blindingly obvious that my
 own attempt to come up with a templating system was both
 bad and wrong!

  Currently all themes are stored beneath:

        /usr/share/gnump3d/

        e.g.
            /usr/share/gnump3d/default
            /usr/share/gnump3d/Tabular
            /usr/share/gnump3d/blah
            ...

  I propose changing the layout to this:

        /usr/share/gnump3d/lang/theme

        e.g.

        /usr/share/gnump3d/en/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/en/default/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/en/Tabular/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/en/Blah

        /usr/share/gnump3d/de/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/de/default/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/de/Tabular/
        /usr/share/gnump3d/de/Blah

  This migration will be a painful one to do, but I think it is
 for the best.  This does allow future extensability, and also
 makes it obvious *where* things should go.

  (The obvious problem I see is upgrading, but we'll sidestep that
 for the moment.)

  As always comments are welcome.

  (Incidently today I'll be renewing gnump3d.org.  Funny how time
 flys?)

Steve
-- 
Debian GNU/Linux System Administration    #  By Steve
http://www.debian-administration.org/     #  http://www.steve.org.uk/