Re: Thoughts on the way to school...

On Saturday 11 of October 2003 12:56, Richard in Public wrote:
> Hi All
>
> About to rush off to (law) school and wanted to put out the following:
> The major limitation of memaid, from my point of view, is item
> management.  The interface is very limited and the text file does not
> lend itself to manual editing.

You actually *can* manually edit file with items - see elements.txt, there is 
even short manual inside.
You can edit question/answers (and even 'magic' data (e.g. last grade, 
intervals, etc.) - if you know what are you doing) and memaid will read it 
instead of elements.bin if you delete elements.bin.

elements.bin doesn't use a propietary format - is well documented 
(unfortunately it's all in C) and open - you, and all people, are free to 
improve it.
I don't hide any informations about memaid - if something is undocummented 
it's because I simply don't have time to write manuals.
All code in memaid is open and you are even free to use it in commercial 
products.

elements.bin format is not very friendly to a human eye, as it's optimized for 
machine, not for human.
If memaid doesn't find elements.bin it tries to open elements.txt which 
contains *the same* data as elements.bin but in more human-friendly format.
(still more machine-friendly than XML, IMHO.)

> I'd really like to see both XML and SQL backends for this (...)

I am not sure if I know what are you asking for. Please correct me if I will 
stray from topic or don't answer your questions/worries.

It's very easy to convert element.txt to XML format (I think I could write 
such script in a few minutes).
If more people would want memaid to store data in XML format - or somebody 
will persuade me it has some real benefit for a common user - I can code it, 
and memaid would use XML.
But in the meantime - if somebody really needs XML - such external script is 
very easy to make, I don't see any problem.
I prefer to make modules (for rarely used features, especially used only by a 
small amount of users) instead of packing all features in memaid itself and 
bloating it.
And if XML format would be used only by a small percent of users - it should 
be in external module (e.g. script), not in binary itself, IMHO.
(Or I miss something? Why Joe user would want to have memaid data in XML 
format? I think Joe user cares more about how long memaid starts.)

About SQL - once again - I believe Joe user doesn't use any database.
At the same time it should be easy to make a script that would play with SQL 
based on element.txt
(BTW: from a script writter point of view: I believe current elements.txt is 
much simpler to use than XML.)

 
> - I feel
> extremely uncomfortable investing precious time creating items that are
> stored in a highly 'proprietary' format.

Ahem. /* no comment */

> Apologies if I've overlooked anything obvious.  My time is sooooo
> limited right now :-(

Same here. :-(
Please let me know why you need (if you need) XML.
Export to XML format should be very easy to make. Import from XML also 
shouldn't be a problem. I just need to be persuaded why bother with XML at 
all in memaid itself.

Dave



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