Re: Feature suggestion

[Rob Holland]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 23:16 +0900, Shigio Yamaguchi wrote:
> I see. In short, you want something like Post-it applicable for online
> source code don't you? It is a very interesting, profitable idea.
> Let's discuss the specification in detail.

This is exactly it. IRC may be a better means of discussing this? I can
be found as "tigger^" on the freenode network.

In case that isn't convenient, here is my rough idea of how it should
work:

A key/value file (normal bdb style) where the key is either the symbol
(easily tracked during a move) or a file name + line number + checksum
of the line.

This way we can easily migrate comment files to new versions of the
source if needed. Comments which refer to symbols are painless as we
already know how to parse the file for symbols and can slot the comment
to the right place. In the case where it is not a specific symbol which
is the target, we take a checksum (ignoring whitespace) so that we can
check the line is still as it was. I presume there would be a
configurable "scan distance" to check lines before/after the one
mentioned in case of line moves. Similar to fuzzy patching.

Maybe it's wise to ignore the line move case to start with in favour of
quicker development of the concept ;)

Anyway, the file format should be very simple, and close to what you
already use as far as I can see.

Once the database format is defined the client should be able to
add/edit/delete comments using the file+line/symbol notation that
gozilla already knows how to parse. This would enable very easy command
line usage and easy integration into $EDITOR.

I hope this has helped a little. If this isn't what you had in mind as a
spec, let me know :)

Thanks,

Rob

-- 
Rob Holland                                 Inverse Path Ltd
Chief R & D Engineer                        -----> <--------

<address@hidden>             http://www.inversepath.com
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