From: Vince Darley (vince@SANTAFE.EDU)
Date: 28 Feb 00, 09:38 EST
From: Vince Darley <vince@SANTAFE.EDU>
Subject: Alpha features: force them to be on?
I have a question about how users would like Alpha to behave:
I recently pulled all of the backup related code out of the various files
in SystemCode and put everything into a single file 'backup.tcl': this
contains all the prefs (backupFolder, backupExtension, backup, ...) and
the actual code to save a backup file, revert to a backup, and adjust menu
entries. It's obviously an improvement that everything is in one place
(for example, if someone ewants to add emacs-like saving of multiple
backups, that should be much easier now), but it has the unfortunate
side-effect of requiring a new 'backup' package which appears as yet
another thing to turn on/off in the 'menus and features' preferences
dialog.
So, my question is: how should this work?
One approach is to leave things as they are, but this is confusing because
to activate backups, you must both (i) turn on the backup package, (ii)
set the 'backup' flag to 1 (but that can be the default).
Another approach is to force the backup package to be active (much like
the isoTime package). It will then not even appear to the user, and Alpha
will behave identically to the current Alpha 7.3. In this case, I'm not
sure there's much point in having a 'backup' package, and I should instead
have a new kind of Alpha add-on (for use in the core only, perhaps) which
uses 'alpha::startup {code}' to register some code to be called at startup
(instead of alpha::extension backup 0.1 {code}).
I don't particularly like the idea of forcing the backup package to be
active, because someone might write a second such package (multibackup)
which I might want to activate instead, if I prefer it.
There are probably other approaches too... A good solution should
probably clarify the distinction between things like isoTime (without
which Alpha will not function), things like 'backup' which are desireable,
but not essential, things like the recent files menu which is pretty
similar, and finally things like remoteTclShell which hardly anyone uses.
Any thoughts?
-- Vince
<http://www.santafe.edu/~vince>