Preliminary Review database

[Tril]

On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Ignaz Kellerer wrote:

> Am 11-Jun-00 schrieb Tril:
> > http://zope.tunes.org/  - Go here
> > 
> > Frequently asked questions:
> > It is using Zope (www.zope.org) and PostgreSQL (www.postgresql.org).
> 
> Zope does have several big disadvantages:
> 
> - it cannot be used offline efficiently.
>   Staying online while editing anything is EXPENSIVE in most
>   countries.

While this is certainly true, it is not beyond comprehension that we could
set up some kind of alternate input system where you could batch-enter
multiple reviews at one time.  The database is stored entirely in SQL, so
if you had some way to output SQL (either if you wrote it manually, or
used some script) you could upload a text file that would commit your
changes all at once. 

Even without that, I think we could live with volunteer editors who can
work on-line. 

> - it does not support CSCW concepts in a reasonable way.
>   Whenever two or more people are trying to edit a text at the same
>   time, Zope discards the changes of anyone but one.

This should not be a problem.  The main "text" being edited is the
reviews.  But I have made those personal, so you can only edit your own
reviews.  The rest is URL's.  I don't see much contention for correcting
the same URL at the same time by different people.

> - it is far from errorproof.
>   Whenever a connection gets broken when trying to send the contents
>   back, the missing part of the contents is clipped and cannot be
>   recovered by itself. (it happened to me)

You mean if your browser is sending some changes to Zope, and it gets cut
off?  I can believe that would happen... although I'm not sure what
happens if an SQL query gets aborted in the middle, it probably gives an
error rather than saving a partial data field.  We will have backups of
the database in the near future, but it is true that if you forsee this
happening a lot it would probably be better to avoid editing over a bad
connection.

> I suggest we use CVS instead of Zope.
> CVS can be used offline; work is not lost even when more than one
> people are working on the same document at the same time; CVS is
> errorproof; and things can be automated with CVS, on server-side as
> well as on client-side.

We already used CVS for Review.  Now, the zope database hasn't replaced
the flat HTML in CVS yet, nor am I going to force it to, but I assume
there would be some use for being able to have multiple views of data,
custom queries, and so on.  I can't see CVS as a solution, but some other
kind of version management in its place.

-- 
David Manifold <dem@tunes.org> http://bespin.dhs.org/~dem/
This message is placed in the public domain.