On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 12:09:29PM -0700, Mark Diggory wrote: [snip] > This is where we need feedback from the community, where are the > pain-points in the current approach to modularity, how do we continue > to step away from the idea of patching DSpace to include addons? These > are questions you can provide requirements/feedback on to assist us in > improving the mechanism.
[Addressing the larger community] Yes, please! You know what odd creatures programmers can be. We need to hear what works well, and especially what does not. People who work on a chunk of code tend to have their priorities affected by their knowledge of its internals. We need to hear regularly what's important to others. [snip] > Separate files for that configuration rather than merging into the > dspace.cfg is a great start, if the addon can operate on defaults > without the files present, your alleviating another installation step > and leaving such additions for customizing default behavior after > installation. Let me second that. IMHO code should whenever possible be designed to operate sensibly (if not exactly what you wanted) without any configuration -- that is: even if the file it looks for cannot be found. Where this is not possible, it should exit cleanly at startup with a clear indication that configuration is required. And separable pieces of a system should be separately configurable. If we're going to continue having sizable flat configuration files, we probably ought to define e.g. 'dspace.core.includeDir' to point to a directory, all of whose content will be slurped up into the configuration manager. Then add-ons can just drop in additional configuration fragments without any editing. Really, it is time for a re-think of DSpace configuration. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Balance your desire for bells and whistles with the reality that only a little more than 2 percent of world population has broadband. -- Ledford and Tyler, _Google Analytics 2.0_
pgpZnx19QJTTA.pgp
Description: PGP signature
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Palm PDK Hot Apps Program offers developers who use the Plug-In Development Kit to bring their C/C++ apps to Palm for a share of $1 Million in cash or HP Products. Visit us here for more details: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;226879339;13503038;l? http://clk.atdmt.com/CRS/go/247765532/direct/01/
_______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
