On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 3:12 PM, DanTMan dan_the_man@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