Snapshot: 2007-02-18

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

This snapshot incorporates the most easy and uncontroversial from
Boud's suggestions and patches, such as translation-related fixes
(including ellipsis and Front Page link), image links starting with
//, and hidden messages.

Download:
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/samizdat/samizdat-snapshot.tar.gz

Expect it in experimental soon.

Status of other outstanding issues:
- calendar: at a quick glance, the design seems to be too intrusive, I
need more time to have a good look at it and see what can be done
about it
- rss-import: I still need to refactor message handling so that this
can be done in a cleaner way
- postgresql 7.4 options: needs some work
- content upload UI: not critical, but easy, will do it a bit later
- GetText bugs: I need more time to investigate it and see if we can
do anything about it from Samzidat side

<rant>
Most of my efforts in last several week went into trying to redesign
Samizdat and port it to an MVC framework. First I tried Nitro, and
then Rails, and unfortunately I have to conclude that the time for
this leap hasn't come yet. Nitro isn't complete enough, and I disagree
with some of the decisions made in it's design (calling layouts
"elements" and making them classes instead of templates was the last
straw for me).

Rails, on the other hand, is much more demanding about how much needs
to be changed in Samizdat: basically, we'd have to rewrite it from
scratch re-using some small parts of old code here and there. I was
prepared to do just that, but when I was blocked stupidest error just
trying to unit-test a basic model, and found out that this particular
error (superclass mismatch) happens in Rails for all kinds of reasons,
none of which seems to apply to my case, I gave up. If it's that
fragile, and this fragility isn't documented properly, I think
Samizdat will be better off on its own.

So here is my challenge to Rails fans reading this rant: if you think
Rails is so cool, and developing applications in Rails is so easy,
give me a port of Samizdat to Rails to prove it. Show me the code.
</rant>

--
Dmitry Borodaenko