On 1/16/15 9:58 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Friday, 16 January 2015 at 17:40:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I just added
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/770, which
generates minified css files. This is because in the near future css
files will become heftier (more documentation comments, more detailed
styles etc).
The disadvantage is that now one needs to be online to generate
documentation. Thoughts?
I would advise against this. If added, it should be opt-in.
Thanks for the feedback.
I see the following issues:
- The service in question might be occasionally down, or might be shut
down completely at some point. This makes it an additional point of
failure.
To counter that I was thinking of:
curl -X POST -s --data-urlencode 'input@$<' http://cssminifier.com/raw
>$@ || cp $< $@
This is nice modulo possible delays due to slow timeouts.
I should also add that we already connect online to fetch LATEST from
github. Incidentally today that takes forever :o).
- High website load or poor Internet speeds will increase the time
needed to build the website.
Actually that's not the case in my experience. Did you build the site
recently, i.e. with dub in tow? Build time is dominated by running dub,
and it's impossible to run it on only the modified portions of the site.
make -j on my laptop takes one full minute without doing anything
online. Running a few curls in parallel with that have plenty of time to
finish.
Then dub generates 286 MB worth of stuff, which takes a long time to
rsync. (For perspective: the pre-dub site, images and all, was 19 MB.)
I'm not sure whether rsync gets further confused by the necessity of
wiping all files and generating them again, whether they're identical or
not.
I confess I'm unhappy with dub. I was hoping for a turnkey solution that
also opens up new possibilities. Sadly it adds its own problems, and
those it solves I know how to do simpler with ddoc and tooling around
it. As things are, I found myself with another project in my lap that I
need to babysit.
- We can't know for sure that at some point the owners of
cssminifier.com won't decide to inject evil code in the output. Even if
you trust the owners, the service might get hacked with the same outcome.
Good point. We could, of course, store the converted css and inspect it
before uploading, but seems a bit like meteor insurance to me.
- As the request goes over HTTP, you also need to trust every peer
between your machine and the website to not perform a MITM attack.
I think relying on a random 3rd-party service is acceptable for an
amateur or hobbyist website, which we are not. Instead, I suggest adding
an optional (opt-in) rule which invokes an offline CSS minifier.
That's a rather dim view of online services :o). What would be a
trustworty offline CSS minifier?
Overall I'm unconvinced of your arguments and I think we should move
forward with
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/770 or a
variation thereof.
Andrei
