Re: Bundles in Agora

[c.]

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.