Re: [OVC-demo-team] More on Eron's WONDERFUL fixes

Eron Lloyd <elloyd@lancaster.lib.pa.us> wrote:
|> several things from evm.*, rather than from evm2003.*. I changed that
|Yeah, I caught that. Fixed for future releases. I guess I'm just
|embittered by Microsoft's use of the date on everything.

I kinda like our having 2003 in there. It's a reminder of when the
project started. And if we ever actually have this "clean break" that
some folks imagine[*], we can call the new one evm2005 or something.

[*] I have written this eight months ago, before most current members
came on: I think it's both unlikely as a practical matter, and REALLY
BAD in principle to plan on -completely- throwing away our exsiting
code. Alan had this bete noir in mind: the demo isn't the production
system. Which is true enough, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far
enough... the same developers should learn from what they've done, but
use the best of it as an ongoing basis--not just concepts, code too.
Maybe each iteration replaces 75% of the last version... but you *keep*
that 25% that was really good. And even after a bunch of versions,
there's always some little trace of version 1. That's not laziness,
it's good practice!

|button's state, "isOn", to test for, and will test by simply "if isOn:". This
|still won't address the issue of backwards compatibility

Apparently it partially will. At least according to Fred and Karl's
test, there was some issue about callbacks under Python 2.2 returning an
integer rather than a real boolean. Since 'True==1' holds, but 'True is
1' does not, the former is neutral. And just testing 'if foo:' is even
more neutral (unless you think you're going to get back strings and
lists, floats, etc. rather than just ints/bools; but that would be bad
for many reasons).

It's true that the change doesn't necessarily solve every other issue,
but that was the one that initially occurred. Datetime and other things
might still be problems.

It's a challenge, I know, to maintain version compatibility. But, for
example, Gnosis Utils is still happy back through 2.1 (and most of it
through 2.0). I like new features, and the newest release was only a
month ago. But restraint or care is good for such a published library.
Admittedly, BRP isn't the same model; I don't want to overextend the
analogy.

|straight into the interpreter (have you ever done this with C/C++ code
|David?), all Python module dependencies (mainly evm2003 and gnosis), and
|shipping it with a static Qt3 .so.

Unfortunately, I have not done this myself. I've read about it being
possible, but that's about all. Certainly it's the right goal,
especially the static Qt.

|Funny thing is, the way I read the spec, it's the other way around.
|votingmachinedata/ is the directory the EBIs are transferred *to*. How they
|get stored on the CD isn't specific.

When you mod the Wiki, why don't you just add an explicit "EBIs and
serial.txt are written to the root of the CD". Maybe you were reading
the old text right, and I was reading it wrong... but simply being
explicit resolves the matter.

|Thanks! I knew I forgot to mention something in my long-winded email, but
|yeah, I removed the PS files from the EBIs I sent out due to their huge size.
|We should make the EBI archive available for testing somewhere...

I *did* upload the ballot PSs to Sourceforge. But I think I might go
back and delete the ones I uploaded, and replace them with gzip'd
versions. Ghostscript reads *.ps.gz files directly without any extra
step... and even if someone uses some other reader, running 'gzip -d' is
probably worth the 4x savings in download size.

Yours, David...

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