mirror of
https://expo.survex.com/repositories/expoweb/.git/
synced 2024-11-22 07:11:55 +00:00
new troggle discussions
This commit is contained in:
Philip Sargent
parent
032dc2210c
commit
fa49555c6d
@ -12,10 +12,11 @@
|
||||
<p>Open issues being worked on:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li>New systems for <a href="menudesign.html">website menus</a>
|
||||
<li>Speculations on <a href="trogdesignx.html">future architectures</a>
|
||||
<li>Critiqued proposal on <a href="trogsimpler.html">future architecture</a>
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
Go on to: <a href="trogarch.html">Troggle architecture</a><br />
|
||||
Go on to: <a href="trogdesignx.html">Troggle design: architecture speculation</a><br />
|
||||
Return to: <a href="trogintro.html">Troggle intro</a><br />
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
|
||||
<li><a href="../computing/regular.html">Regular tasks</a>: housekeeping as surveys are digitised.
|
||||
<li><a href="otherscripts.html">Other scripts</a> - photos, folk, wallets - not integral parts of troggle.
|
||||
<li><a href="trogarch.html">Troggle and database</a> architecture: how it all fits together
|
||||
<li><a href="trogdesign.html">Design decisions</a>: e.g. new systems for <a href="menudesign.html">website menus</a>
|
||||
<li><a href="trogdesign.html">Design decisions</a> inc. troggle replacement e.g. new systems for <a href="menudesign.html">website menus</a>
|
||||
<li><a href="trogdocm.html">Maintain troggle</a> itself. The code is public on repository <a href="../computing/repos.html">:troggle:</a>
|
||||
<li><a href="trognotes.html">Uncategorised notes</a> and past speculations
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -352,141 +352,16 @@ Storage:
|
||||
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
|
||||
<h3> Radost's proposal</h3>
|
||||
<div style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large">
|
||||
<p>Radost Waszkiewicz (CUCC member 2016-2019) proposed a plan for superceding troggle</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
Hey,<br>
|
||||
|
||||
on the design sesh we've looked a bit on the way data is organised in the
|
||||
loser repo and how to access it via troggle.
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
A proposal arised that all this database shannaingans is essentially
|
||||
unnecessary - we have about 200 caves, about 250 entrances, about 200
|
||||
people and couple dozen expos. We don't need efficient lookups at all. We
|
||||
can write something which will be 'slow' and make only things we actually
|
||||
care about.
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[What Rad has misunderstood here is that the database is not for speed. We use it mostly so that we can manage 'referential integrity' i.e. have all the different bits of information match up correctly. While the total size of the data is small, the interrelationships and complexity is quite large. From the justification for troggle: <p>"A less obvious but more deeply rooted problem was the lack of relational information. One table named folk.csv stored
|
||||
names of all expedition members, the years in which they were present, and a link to a biography page. This was great
|
||||
for displaying a table of members by expedition year, but what if you wanted to display a list of people who wrote in the
|
||||
logbook about a certain cave in a certain expedition year? Theoretically, all of the necessary information to produce that
|
||||
list has been recorded in the logbook, but there is no way to access it because there is no connection between the
|
||||
person's name in folk.csv and the entries he wrote in the logbook".
|
||||
<p>And for ensuring survey data does not get lost we need to coordinate people, trips, survex blocks,
|
||||
survex files, drawing files (several formats), QMs, wallet-progress pages, rigging guides, entrance photos, GPS tracks, kataster boundaries, scans of sketches, scans of underground notes, and dates for all those - Philip Sargent]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Similarly I see little gain from doing the html - python himera
|
||||
template pages. These contain mainly nested for loops which could just as
|
||||
well be written in e.g. python.
|
||||
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[He could indeed. But for most people producing HTML while writing in python is just unnecessarily difficult.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
I'd advocate following solution:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> give up on fixing things in troggle
|
||||
<li> have a small number of .py scripts which generate static webpages with
|
||||
content we want
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[A reasonable proposal, but needs quantifying with all the things troggle does
|
||||
which Rad was unaware of. This will not be a "small" number but it needs estimating. We don't need
|
||||
everything troggle does for us of course, but that doesn't mean that removing django/troggle
|
||||
will reduce the total amount of code. The input data parsers will be nearly the same size obviously.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
Why do this:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> we don't have multiple intermediate layers all of which are difficult to
|
||||
maintain
|
||||
<li> anyone can run this on their machine without need for local vm's
|
||||
<li> to change something there is one thing you change - script that generates
|
||||
pages belonging to particular pattern. currently you need to take care of
|
||||
parsers, view script, url script, and template
|
||||
<li> it runs offline (just like that as pages are just blocks of literal text
|
||||
+ some javascript)
|
||||
<li> we never end up with no working copy during expo - run scripts once
|
||||
before expedition and put results in /backup and just leave it there till
|
||||
next year. Something goes wrong on the daily updated version - we have a
|
||||
very easy fallback
|
||||
<li> just one (or very close to it) programming language
|
||||
<li> change to python3 to parse silly chars
|
||||
<li> wayyyy fewer lines of code and substantially better code to comment ratio
|
||||
(if this is us writing this now)
|
||||
<li> compatible with all the already existing static pages
|
||||
<li> we can host this on a potato hosting as we're not running anything fancy
|
||||
anymore
|
||||
<li> get's rid of the horrifying url rewrites that correspond to no files that
|
||||
exist
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[This vastly underestimates the number of things that troggle does for us. See "<a href="/expofiles/documents/troggle/troggle_paper.pdf" download>Troggle: a novel system for cave exploration information management</a>". And a VM is not required to run and debug troggle.
|
||||
Sam has produced a docker variant which he uses extensively.
|
||||
<p>Troggle today has 8,200 lines of python (including comments and blank lines), plus 600 in imagekit and 200 in flatpages. 2,200 of those are in the parsers. Django itself has a lot more, including integration with TinyMCE in-browser HTML editor. </em>]
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
How much work would this actually take:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> most likely one script per page type, so far page types that are
|
||||
obviously needed:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li>cave index
|
||||
<li>individual cave descriptions
|
||||
<li>logbooks
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<li> more than half of the parsers are already rewriten by me and can be
|
||||
changed to do this instead of modifying SQL database with minimal effort
|
||||
<li> html/css side of things already exists, but it would be nice to go for a
|
||||
more modern look there as well
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[The effort estimate is similarly a gross underestimate because (a) he assumes one script per page of output, forgetting all the core work to create a central consistent dataset, and (b) he is missing out most
|
||||
of the functionality we use without realizing it because it is built into
|
||||
django's SQL system, such as multi-user operations.
|
||||
<p><span style="color:red">Eventually we will have to migrate from django of course</span>, as it will eventually
|
||||
fail to keep up with the rest of the world. Right now we need to get ourselves onto python3
|
||||
so that we can use an LTS release which has current security updates. This is
|
||||
<a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/internals/release-process/#supported-versions-policy">more urgent for django</a> than for Linux. In Ubuntu terms we are on 18.04 LTS (Debian 10) which has no free maintenance updates from 2023. <span style="color:red">We should plan to migrate troggle from django to another framework in about 2025. See stroggle below.</span>]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
Things this [Rad's] solution doesn't solve:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> no webpage-based 'wizzard' for creating caves and such (did people use it
|
||||
much? do we care?) -> maybe 'send an email to this address' is the ultimate
|
||||
solution to this
|
||||
<li> uploading photos is still difficult (in the sense that they don't get
|
||||
minified automatically)
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
Rad
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[Creating a cave description for a new cave, and especially linking in images,
|
||||
is currently so difficult that only a couple of people can do it. Fixing this is
|
||||
a matter of urgency. No one should have to imagine where the path to a file will be but isn't now.
|
||||
We need a file uploading system to put things in the right place; and this would help photos too.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<h3>stroggle</h3>
|
||||
<p>At one time Martin Green attempted to reimplement troggle as "stroggle" using <a href="https://www.fullstackpython.com/flask.html">flask</a> instead of Django at
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitorious">git@gitorious.org:stroggle/stroggle.git</a> (but gitorious has been deleted).</p>
|
||||
<p>A copy of this project is archived by Wookey on <a href="http://wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/">wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/</a>.
|
||||
<p>There is also a copy of stroggle on the backed-up, read-only copy of gitorious on "<a href="https://gitorious.org/">gitorious valhalla</a>"<br />
|
||||
<a href="https://gitorious.org/stroggle/stroggle.git/">stroggle code</a></br>
|
||||
<a href="https://gitorious.org/stroggle/stroggle-gitorious-wiki.git/">stroggle-gitorious-wiki</a></br>
|
||||
but note that this domain has an expired certificate so https:// complains.
|
||||
<p>The schema for stroggle is <a href="http://wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/git/exampledata/expo/schema.json">a schema.json file</a>. See the comparable <a href="datamodel.html">troggle schema file</a> which is indeed horrendously bigger.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<h3><a id="arch">Archived updates</a></h3>
|
||||
<p>Since 2008 we have been keeping detailed records of all data management system updates in the version control system.
|
||||
Before then we manually maintained <a href="../computing/update.html">a list of updates</a> which are now only of historical interest.
|
||||
<p>A history of the expo website and software was published in Cambridge Underground 1996. A copy of this article <a href="c21bs.html">Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</a> is archived here.
|
||||
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
Go on to: <a href="trogarch.html">Troggle architecture</a><br />
|
||||
Return to: <a href="trogdesign.html">Troggle design notes</a><br />
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
157
handbook/troggle/trogsimpler.html
Normal file
157
handbook/troggle/trogsimpler.html
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,157 @@
|
||||
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||||
<html>
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
|
||||
<title>Handbook Troggle - a kinder simpler troggle?</title>
|
||||
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../css/main2.css" />
|
||||
</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 - a kinder simpler troggle?</h1>
|
||||
<p>Troggle runs much of the the cave survey data management, presents the data on the website and manages the Expo Handbook.
|
||||
|
||||
<h3>stroggle</h3>
|
||||
<p>At one time Martin Green attempted to reimplement troggle as "stroggle" using <a href="https://www.fullstackpython.com/flask.html">flask</a> instead of Django at
|
||||
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitorious">git@gitorious.org:stroggle/stroggle.git</a> (but gitorious has been deleted).</p>
|
||||
<p>A copy of this project is archived by Wookey on <a href="http://wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/">wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/</a>.
|
||||
<p>There is also a copy of stroggle on the backed-up, read-only copy of gitorious on "<a href="https://gitorious.org/">gitorious valhalla</a>"<br />
|
||||
<a href="https://gitorious.org/stroggle/stroggle.git/">stroggle code</a></br>
|
||||
<a href="https://gitorious.org/stroggle/stroggle-gitorious-wiki.git/">stroggle-gitorious-wiki</a></br>
|
||||
but note that this domain has an expired certificate so https:// complains.
|
||||
<p>The schema for stroggle is <a href="http://wookware.org/software/cavearchive/stroggle/git/exampledata/expo/schema.json">a schema.json file</a>. See the comparable <a href="datamodel.html">troggle schema file</a> which is indeed horrendously bigger.
|
||||
|
||||
<h3>Radost's proposal</h3>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This part of the handbook is intended for people
|
||||
maintaining the troggle software.
|
||||
Day to day cave recording and surveying tasks are documented
|
||||
in the expo "survey handbook"
|
||||
|
||||
<div style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large">
|
||||
<p>Radost Waszkiewicz (CUCC member 2016-2019) proposed a plan for superceding troggle</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
Hey,<br>
|
||||
|
||||
on the design sesh we've looked a bit on the way data is organised in the
|
||||
loser repo and how to access it via troggle.
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
A proposal arised that all this database shannaingans is essentially
|
||||
unnecessary - we have about 200 caves, about 250 entrances, about 200
|
||||
people and couple dozen expos. We don't need efficient lookups at all. We
|
||||
can write something which will be 'slow' and make only things we actually
|
||||
care about.
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[What Rad has misunderstood here is that the database is not for speed. We use it mostly so that we can manage 'referential integrity' i.e. have all the different bits of information match up correctly. While the total size of the data is small, the interrelationships and complexity is quite large. From the justification for troggle: <p>"A less obvious but more deeply rooted problem was the lack of relational information. One table named folk.csv stored
|
||||
names of all expedition members, the years in which they were present, and a link to a biography page. This was great
|
||||
for displaying a table of members by expedition year, but what if you wanted to display a list of people who wrote in the
|
||||
logbook about a certain cave in a certain expedition year? Theoretically, all of the necessary information to produce that
|
||||
list has been recorded in the logbook, but there is no way to access it because there is no connection between the
|
||||
person's name in folk.csv and the entries he wrote in the logbook".
|
||||
<p>And for ensuring survey data does not get lost we need to coordinate people, trips, survex blocks,
|
||||
survex files, drawing files (several formats), QMs, wallet-progress pages, rigging guides, entrance photos, GPS tracks, kataster boundaries, scans of sketches, scans of underground notes, and dates for all those - Philip Sargent]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Similarly I see little gain from doing the html - python himera
|
||||
template pages. These contain mainly nested for loops which could just as
|
||||
well be written in e.g. python.
|
||||
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[He could indeed. But for most people producing HTML while writing in python is just unnecessarily difficult.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
I'd advocate following solution:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> give up on fixing things in troggle
|
||||
<li> have a small number of .py scripts which generate static webpages with
|
||||
content we want
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[A reasonable proposal, but needs quantifying with all the things troggle does
|
||||
which Rad was unaware of. This will not be a "small" number but it needs estimating. We don't need
|
||||
everything troggle does for us of course, but that doesn't mean that removing django/troggle
|
||||
will reduce the total amount of code. The input data parsers will be nearly the same size obviously.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
Why do this:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> we don't have multiple intermediate layers all of which are difficult to
|
||||
maintain
|
||||
<li> anyone can run this on their machine without need for local vm's
|
||||
<li> to change something there is one thing you change - script that generates
|
||||
pages belonging to particular pattern. currently you need to take care of
|
||||
parsers, view script, url script, and template
|
||||
<li> it runs offline (just like that as pages are just blocks of literal text
|
||||
+ some javascript)
|
||||
<li> we never end up with no working copy during expo - run scripts once
|
||||
before expedition and put results in /backup and just leave it there till
|
||||
next year. Something goes wrong on the daily updated version - we have a
|
||||
very easy fallback
|
||||
<li> just one (or very close to it) programming language
|
||||
<li> change to python3 to parse silly chars
|
||||
<li> wayyyy fewer lines of code and substantially better code to comment ratio
|
||||
(if this is us writing this now)
|
||||
<li> compatible with all the already existing static pages
|
||||
<li> we can host this on a potato hosting as we're not running anything fancy
|
||||
anymore
|
||||
<li> get's rid of the horrifying url rewrites that correspond to no files that
|
||||
exist
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[This vastly underestimates the number of things that troggle does for us. See "<a href="/expofiles/documents/troggle/troggle_paper.pdf" download>Troggle: a novel system for cave exploration information management</a>". And a VM is not required to run and debug troggle.
|
||||
Sam has produced a docker variant which he uses extensively.
|
||||
<p>Troggle today has 8,200 lines of python (including comments and blank lines), plus 600 in imagekit and 200 in flatpages. 2,200 of those are in the parsers. Django itself has a lot more, including integration with TinyMCE in-browser HTML editor. </em>]
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
How much work would this actually take:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> most likely one script per page type, so far page types that are
|
||||
obviously needed:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li>cave index
|
||||
<li>individual cave descriptions
|
||||
<li>logbooks
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<li> more than half of the parsers are already rewriten by me and can be
|
||||
changed to do this instead of modifying SQL database with minimal effort
|
||||
<li> html/css side of things already exists, but it would be nice to go for a
|
||||
more modern look there as well
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[The effort estimate is similarly a gross underestimate because (a) he assumes one script per page of output, forgetting all the core work to create a central consistent dataset, and (b) he is missing out most
|
||||
of the functionality we use without realizing it because it is built into
|
||||
django's SQL system, such as multi-user operations.
|
||||
<p><span style="color:red">Eventually we will have to migrate from django of course</span>, as it will eventually
|
||||
fail to keep up with the rest of the world. Right now we need to get ourselves onto python3
|
||||
so that we can use an LTS release which has current security updates. This is
|
||||
<a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/internals/release-process/#supported-versions-policy">more urgent for django</a> than for Linux. In Ubuntu terms we are on 18.04 LTS (Debian 10) which has no free maintenance updates from 2023. <span style="color:red">We should plan to migrate troggle from django to another framework in about 2025. See stroggle below.</span>]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
Things this [Rad's] solution doesn't solve:
|
||||
<ul>
|
||||
<li> no webpage-based 'wizzard' for creating caves and such (did people use it
|
||||
much? do we care?) -> maybe 'send an email to this address' is the ultimate
|
||||
solution to this
|
||||
<li> uploading photos is still difficult (in the sense that they don't get
|
||||
minified automatically)
|
||||
</ul>
|
||||
Rad
|
||||
<div style="margin-left: 4em; margin-right:4em; font-family: sanserif"><em>
|
||||
[Creating a cave description for a new cave, and especially linking in images,
|
||||
is currently so difficult that only a couple of people can do it. Fixing this is
|
||||
a matter of urgency. No one should have to imagine where the path to a file will be but isn't now.
|
||||
We need a file uploading system to put things in the right place; and this would help photos too.]
|
||||
</em>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
Go on to: <a href="trogarch.html">Troggle architecture</a><br />
|
||||
Return to: <a href="trogdesign.html">Troggle design notes</a><br />
|
||||
<hr />
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user