On Sun, 2007-08-12 at 17:50 -0400, David Boyes wrote: > > On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 06:01 -0400, John Drescher wrote: > > > > > Also after running bat I noticed something that may be a display > bug. > > > Attached is the picture. Notice the dates in the job plot are all > > > smashed together making them unreadable. > > And Dirk responded: > > > Actually that looks right, you just need to start refining the plot > your > > seeing. > > [snip complicated explanation of how to adjust the display to > > avoid character mangling] > > If the goal is to reach enterprise customers, then this isn't a good set > of base parameters.
My goal in the efforts on bat has been to make it so that administrators taking a look at bacula are not making decisions to insall and use based on the lack of a graphical interface for administration purposes. I felt that a graphing interface was not something important from a competitve standpoint because I've never seen any other backup application that graphs. Kern felt that a graphing interface was important. Out of respect for his opinion, I created the JobPlot interface. It was however, not what I thought was important to be working on. Maybe that is what is showing. > You've got about 7 seconds to make a good first > impression on someone you're going to ask for money, and a display with > mangled characters loses pretty much immediately. Just for the record, I have not asked for any money.:) > Good GUIs shouldn't > let users do things that foul visibility, or at minimum, warn them it's > going to happen and why. That way it's not your fault when they can't > read something...8-) I guess that is a general request that I don't completely understand the details of how to accomplish. My recollection is that the qwt graphing classes allows for the text that identifies an axis to be at any angle. I've seen plots where the x-axis is at 45 or 30 degrees that looked quite nice. This however would decrease the amount of space available to the plot. Space that I know is sometimes not huge when the user first sees it. Hopefully, anyone demonstrating understands how to float and maximize the plot window. I thought that it was really advantageous to have the x-axis timestamp displayed to be converted from seconds since the unix epoch to a date. It is not even the midnight point. To accomplish the converstion required a class which inherits a qwt class and replaces the axis text function. In an attempt to give a good Idea of midnight on the plot I added the vertical lines for the first of each month. > > I'd suggest making the trend display a separate graph and defaulting to > one day in the job display. One day??? For most jobs that might be one plotting point. Now I'm more confused > If the user wants trends, let him ask for > them. I'm pretty sure thats what the selection controls are intended for. Your confusing me. > Also, you may want to calculate a bounding box for the labels > individually, and if the box drops under 50% of the average font > horizontal or vertical glyph size, you may want to pop a warning box > that some labels may be obscured and the user should pick a smaller time > interval for clarity. Now your discussing something that qwt does internally. Of this, I have no experience. My limited experience is with the qwt api. In general the limits in the plotting class are currently using the same defaults that the joblist class uses. If you think that the limits should be a different set of values from the preferences with different initiated values, that is one possibility. One thought that I had was to only allow the graphing class to be instantiated from the joblist class. Then the user would be looking at a list of jobs that he/she has already decided there is an interest in seeing a plot of. .... Just for the record, my opinion is that graphing capabilities is the frosting on the cake. Something sweet but not a deal breaker to an administrator installing for testing. The feature that is missing that is thought of as a deal breaker by the other administrators at my company is the requirement to edit configuration files manually instead of graphically. It is my desire to begin working on adding capabilities to have graphical interfaces to modify all resource stanza types in the bacula-dir.conf. This I will begin working on as soon as Kern is prepared to contemplate a method to allow me to get bat to do this. If there were a developer that is interested in working on the graphing capabilities and accepting responsibilities for the jobplot class, that would please me greatly. Dirk
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