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What troggle does badly

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handbook/troggle/trogdesign.html
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</head>
<body><style>body { background: #fff url(/images/style/bg-system.png) repeat-x 0 0 }</style>
<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook</h2>
<h1>Troggle Design Decisions</h1>
<h1>What Troggle Does Badly - Design Decisions</h1>
<p>Practical use of troggle quickly shows up serious shortcomings:
<p>Specific, immediate problems:
<ul>
<li><h4><a href="#fail">Things Troggle Doesn't Do</a></h4>
<li><h4><a href="#badly">Things Troggle Does Badly</a></h4>
<li><h4><a href="#change">New Things Troggle will need to Manage</a></h4>
<li><h4><a href="#specific">Specific, Immediate problems</a></h4>
</ul>
<p><em>Updated: 11 March 2022</em>
<h2 id="fail">Things Troggle Doesn't Do</h2>
<p>Mostly these are not just a problem just with troggle, but things where expo procedures have never been
properly created or applied, or where there was a procedure but it fell out of use because it wasn't easy
enough to persist with.
<h3>Finding and identifying entrances</h3>
<p>This is abolutely crap. We have a manual, undocumented, probably incomplete offline set of scripts which
produced a GPX file in 2019,
which we have no easy way of delivering to a mobile device.
The troggle pages for the cave and entrance descriptions do not have any location information on them, as it
is generated quite separately from the survex files and fixed-points. And it is all in Austrian grid coordinates not WGS84 too.
<p>We have no procedure whatsoever to capture photos of cave entrances and to get them associated witht he entrance data in troggle.
<p>Our former prospecting guide has died of terminal obsolescence.
<p>It should be perfectly possible to convert the entrance data as listed in the second table on
<a href="/eastings">the troggle 'ents' page</a> into WGS84 and display it in the entrance description pages.
<p>We really want a prospecting map showing entrances which are clickable,
so that the entrance description pops up.
<p>Our procedures for 'tag', 'exact tag', and 'other tag' are undocumented and need to be redone.
<h3>Using Question Marks in active exploration</h3>
<p>See <a href="scriptsqms.html">the current ugly situation</a>.
<h3>Supporting Final Survey Preparation</h3>
<p>We have no procedure for this. And also no proper procedures (or even agreed single final location) for rigging topos either. We have a bucket folder for final drawn-up surveys on expofiles.
<h3>Use with Common Social Media</h3>
<p>The 2019 expo was documented on two different blogs and the content has still not got copied into
our own expo logbooks. One of these is UK caving, and for one post the caver used an ephemeral location for
the illutrating photographs - which were very good. We have these archived on expofiles somewhere.
<p>We seem to have lost the expo twitter account credentials.
<p>We have an expo Facebook account.
<p>We used to use Slack and (in 2022) use Trello for expo organisation. We have moved from Slack to
Element, which we can archive ourseleves, and maybe we can use Kanboard (ditto) next year instead of Trello.
<h2 id="badly">Things Troggle Does Badly</h2>
<h3>Online Wallet Management</h3>
<p>The results are not too bad, but some poor caver has to edit a JSON file in each online wallet on the
<em>expo laptop</em>. It should be a straightforward job to move the code in
<a href="scriptscurrent.html#wallets"><var>wallets.py</var></a> into
troggle, create troggle reports to duplicate the 3 different types of pages produced by the script, and add
an online form to create the equivalent to the JSON file.
<p>The current script does only a single year at a time. When incorporated into troggle, we will be able to
do all outstanding years worth of work.
<p>We have all the wallets data for 1999 but it needs to be restructured into the modern file structure
before we can run the script on it. (We have scanned survey logbooks for 1989-1998 and a wallet structure
could be restrospectively created with a bit of data archeology. If we did that, we could then apply the same
data consistency tools. This is only likely to be worthwhile if we need to seriously return to 1623/161).
<h3>Writing Cave Descriptions</h3>
<p>In 2022 we have a working online form to create or edit the cave and entrance descriptions. But the URL
namespace of the form is different from where the cave description will be actually published, so getting
the A HREF tags and IMG SRC tags correct for the referenced passage text and photos, and also to relevant
bits of logbook, is unnecessarily convoluted.
<p>This needs a small but significant re-design.
<h3>Consistency Checking between Input Sources</h3>
<p>We have a manual, offline, poorly-documented script <a
href="scriptscurrent.html#survex">check-svx.sh</a> which does some checks on survex files' *ref wallet
references. We have a similar thing <var>check-xml.sh</var> that checks Tunnel file references to survex
files. We have the beginnings of a parser to do the same for Therion drawings. These are currently
no better than proof-of-concept and need to be rewritten in troggle.
<p>We could do with reports that identify survex files with no equivalent logbook entry (which would show
up all the ARGE surveys, but we could filter those out).
<p>We could do with finding drawn-up Tunnel and Therio files with no documented link to their source data
in survex files.
<p>We could do with better reports on survex files which have neved been drawn up ("tunnelled").
<h3>API for Different Front Ends</h3>
<p>We have proof of concept for <a href="/api/expeditions_json">one</a> of these: a simple list of
expeditions. There are 61 different types of reports produced by troggle, some of which have complex
internal structure which would need several API URLs. Nobody has attempted to produce any kind of alternative
special-purpose front-end yet.
<h3>Onboarding new People to Help</h3>
<p>This is discussed on <a href="https://app.element.io/#/room/!wTGfwrwfiRMsZvzGZW:matrix.org">Element</a>
and there are extensive previous discussions on <a href="https://app.slack.com/client/TQF95LK8T/CSCD0HW3S/thread/CQUM4L3HD-1579458900.001800">Slack</a>.
<h3>Expofiles archiving</h3>
The <a href="/expofiles">expofiles</a> folders are 40 GB of folders with no documnted archiving or backup procedures.
Informally, several expo nerds have complete copies, but some better means of managing it are overdue.
<h3>Fossil Software that needs Replacing</h3>
<p>There are a lot of things where the troggle software mostly works, but is clunky or confusing, and where
the maintenance is difficult because several different epochs of software techniques are munged together.
So this makes future enhancement slower and more difficult as historic special cases need to be re-done.
This is technical debt.
<p>We import <b>cavers' names</b> in three separate places: the folk list, the names of the surveyors in
survex files, and the names of expoers in the logbooks. These are inconsistently validated.
<p>We have half a dozen different <b>logbook HTML dialects</b> for different eras of expo logbooks. These should be
converted into one, simpler form. Then we can reduce the size of the logbooks parsers substantially.
<p>We have the HTML folder structure for complex caves in the same <b>URL namespace as the cave descriptions</b>
generated by troggle. This is a fossil from when the cave descriptions were actual HTML files (generated
offline) and needed to be local so that they would have simple access to the linked photographs and passage
description pages. This prevents us using "EditThisPage" on those complex descriptions, which thus adds
another level of pain on doing this task which is already much more difficult than it needs to be.
<h2 id="change">New Things Troggle will need to Manage</h2>
<h3>Users with Only a Phone, No Computer</h3>
<p>The possible alternative front-ends using the (in development) API would help.
As would a complete alternative phone-centric design of the CSS and <a href="menudesign.html">menuing system</a>.
<h3>GPS altitudes</h3>
<p>GPS is currently great for route-finding and locating entrances, but it is much less useful in those
parts where there are steep cliffs as the height accuracy is dreadful. When GPS fixes the altitude
accuracy, it will open a new range of uses.
<h3>3D Cave surveying</h3>
<p>There are some wonderful demos of fly-through surveys which use visual flow, phone ultrasonic range
detection and/or lidar. These will be big files and unsuited to being stored in a git repository - as we
currently do for Tunnel and Therion Drawings.
<h3>Geographic Software (GIS) and Terrain Model Integration</h3>
<p>One-off attempts have been made at this for the past 15 years at least, e.g. the 3D view of the whole
SMK ridge on <a href="/guidebook/areas.htm">the Areas page</a>.
<p>Historic QGIS work is archived at <a href="/expofiles/qgis_resources">expofiles/qgis_resources</a>
expofiles\qgis_resources
<p>CaveView does a wondeful job of animating 3D survex centre-lines, and when this is restored to use it will
make a difference.
<p>Julian has a high-quality lidar of the whole plateau area but it has not been as useful as we hoped.
<h3>Good Internet Access across the Plateau</h3>
<p>Troggle is now sufficently portable that we can run the entire system on a laptop: it doesn't need
internet access. We could design clever caching so that just an ordinary web browser could take effective a
complete copy, but if universal internet access is coming anyway, any such work would be wasted.
<h2 id="specific">Specific, Immediate problems</h2>
<ul>
<li>New systems for <a href="menudesign.html">website menus</a>
<li><s>Short-term note on "logon" <a href="trogregistr.html">django-registration</a></s>

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<a href="trogmanual.html">Troggle - Maintenance</a> - list of maintenance tasks<br>
<a href="trogarch.html">Troggle - Architecture</a> - diagrams, files, structure<br>
<a href="datamodel.html">Troggle - Data Model</a> - syntax-coloured list of classes, instance variables and foreign keys<br>
<a href="trogdesign.html">Troggle - Design Decisions for the Future</a> - open issues being worked on:<br>
<a href="trogdesign.html">Troggle - What it does Badly</a> - Design Decisions for the Future<br>
<ul>
<li><a href="trogregistr.html">Troggle Login and user registration</a> - proposal to remove registration<br>
<li><a href="menudesign.html">Troggle Menu Design</a> - options for replacing the menuing system<br><br>