Subject:
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Re: Automatic download of unofficial parts in LDView
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
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Date:
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Sun, 14 May 2006 16:25:42 GMT
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Viewed:
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1787 times
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In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Damien Guichard wrote:
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In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Travis Cobbs wrote:
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I’m working on a feature in LDView where it will automatically check the
parts tracker for unofficial parts when it encounters a file that it can’t
find. This has the potential to produce a fairly large amount of requests
to the parts tracker, so I have some questions.
First of all, is this acceptable for LDView to do? It can definitely make
the user experience much more enjoyable when opening other people’s files
that use unofficial parts. But on the other hand, it will generate an
as-yet unknown amount of additional traffic to the parts tracker.
Looking at LDView’s SourceForge.net download page, I see that as of now
there have been 1734 downloads of the LDView 3.0 executables (1811 total
LDView 3 downloads minus 77 source downloads). From that, I think it’s safe
to say that the number of unique LDView users is probably at least 500 and
more likely in excess of 1000.
I will definitely configure it to not check for any particular file more
often than some certain threshold. The threshold will be at least one day,
but could probably realistically be set to a week. This threshold will be
client-side, though. That means that every user will have their own unique
list of files that have been checked “recently”. Note that even if it has
downloaded an unofficial file, it will still need to check the tracker to
see if the file has been updated since it was downloaded. This will use the
same “recently” threshold.
Furthermore, there’s really no way to tell purely based on the filename if
the file is a part. So any models that reference missing sub-assemblies
will cause LDView to check the parts tracker for these sub-assemblies. On
top of that, there’s no way to tell if the file is a primitive (unless it’s
in the 48/ directory). So every primitive will first have to be queried as
a part. When that fails, it will be queried as a primitive. Additionally,
every file that doesn’t have an s/ prefix will be queried as a primitive if
no part exists. This particular problem could be fixed server-side, though,
if there was some new base URL added that automatically checked for the file
as a part, and then automatically checked as a primitive if the part didn’t
exist. (If LDView successfully downloads a file once, it will remember what
it is, thus preventing the double check when checking to see if the file has
been updated on the tracker.)
So, to the admins of ldraw.org, what do you think?
--Travis
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Hi Travis,
It’s good to know you still think about adding even more features to LDView.
At some feature-complete point many programmers prefer to switch to a newer
thus more exiting development rather than cherrish and grow the baby.
However, in my humble opinion the whole point in having official/unofficial
distinction is only official parts are supported. By supporting unofficial
parts in a user-transparent way the risk is that you blurr this essential
distinction. The official and recommended way to include an unofficial part
is to include it as a subpart because it’s the only way to guarantee
model-file continuity. The viewer tool is a wrong place to solve a problem
that wouldn’t exist if the modeller tool was correctly used.
(Just my 2 cents)
-- damien
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Hi Travis,
I have to second Damien’s view but I can think of a possible way around it. If
you were to download the unofficial parts into a distinct directory (eg. in the
ldview dir tree) and then call them from there it would allow an inexperienced
viewer to see things in a transparent way without blurring this distinction
between official and unofficial.
Tim
PS. These are my personal views, not SteerCo views.
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