On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 3:12 PM, DanTMan <dan_the_man(a)telus.net> wrote:
Damnit... SF mailing lists strike again...
^_^ Any chance of also improving interface/usability of interface?
The user-config.py file is quite basic, it's got nothing but basic data
and configuration, it could easily be simplified to use a code
modifiable format like ini or xml. I see a lot of users who have the
initial issue "Why does my configuration file not work?" or they don't
even know how to use it.
I like the flexibility of the current system. Xml sucks for config
files because it is too complicated and ini files only allow one level
of depth. Besides users who do not know how to configure their bot
should not run it at all.
Then there are the people with the issue of the family
files...
Honestly, the rewrite is already trying to move to an API format, and
there is very little data put in family files which we can't get from
the API... Almost nothing except URL related things.
Agree
Ok, bots need to be run from cli, otherwise options
can't be passed to
them, so I'm not saying we should use a GUI.
However, python is built with the ability to act as a shell.
Why don't we turn this into something run by an interactive shell,
people already need to open up a cli, by why make them try and figure
out how to handle a confusing set of other files when we could probably
let them handle the data over the cli.
So to startup someone would type this to enter the shell:
python pywiki.py
To run a bot:
> run replace wiki=foo start=! regex=True "Bar[0-9]" "Baz5"
That could be an additional interface, but should never be the only one.
But in any case this is middleware or even frontend talk whereas the
current development focuses on backend, as far as I know. But it is
worth exploring.
Bryan