Re: thoughts on meta-data

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005, Bill Mill wrote:
>
> However, I *still* think it's worth examining for the core. Especially 
> if we can save the file handles, already seeked to the right place, this 
> could be a time savings. .09 seconds is a small enough number to warrant 
> trying it out in the core to see how it works in the real world.

I think this is definitely the way to go (minus the bit about keeping file 
handles because that's not a good idea--we'll run out) because it's the 
right thing to do.  It allows plugins to operate on the metadata in the 
entries and that's definitely what we want to happen.  It enables us to 
use mtimes set in the entry's metadata instead of the filesystem's 
os.stat.  This combined with a couple of other changes will enable us to 
build a sort callback.

It will cause a speed reduction, but the flip side is that the changes 
we're making will enable other kinds of caching which we can't do right 
now without some hacking.

Between entry caching, index caching, and static rendering, I think we can 
handle people who have intense blogs for whom the speed issue is a real 
problem.  (i.e. Ted)

So I think the speed issue, unless it's a really severe one, isn't a 
show-stopper and Bill's idea is definitely worth proto-typing.


Continuing on with refactoring, as near as I can tell no one has used the 
entry API to build other kinds of entries; everyone either instantiates 
base entries or FileEntry objects.  So I'm thinking maybe in the next 
version of PyBlosxom we should simplify the entry stuff into a single 
Entry object and put the code in Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py along with the 
Request object.  If we take the file-centric code out of Entry and stick 
it in a function that populates the Entry object with the file contents, 
then I think we're fine and we'll find that's a better model.

Anyhow, I'd like to work on this with Bill if he's ok with that.

/will


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