Forum OpenACS Development: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"?

Collapse
1: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"?
Posted by Dave Bauer on 10/07/03 02:31 AM
Only a developer would know the difference anyway. I think this adds unneeded complexity (not that much, more an annoyance) to the interface. Would a site-wide admin know where to look to install a certain package?
Collapse
2: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Peter Marklund on 10/07/03 10:54 AM
Dave,
I'm not sure what the best UI is. But I believe the thinking has been that an admin typically only wants to choose among applications and not have to bother with service packages. The service packages will be installed by default based on the applications chosen.
Collapse
3: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 10/07/03 11:52 AM
Yeah. The idea is that most sane people don't want to install "notifications".

They want to install a bug-tracker, and then installing bug-tracker will cause notifications to get installed as well.

So "application" is anything that is actually usable in itself.

I'd like to move the services part out completely, or at least obscure it even more.

/Lars

Collapse
4: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 10/07/03 03:44 PM
That makes sense for notifications, but I'm not sure it works for all other packages.  general-comments isn't required by anything (as far as I know) but it can be optionally installed and used.  So IMHO we shouldn't make it too hard for the site admin to do that.

Personally, speaking as a developer, the distinction between applications and services has always annoyed me. If I need to watch a file in a service it requires an extra page load to get there in the APM.  Maybe we could have a "developer mode" that would show all packages on one page?

Collapse
8: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 4)
Posted by Randy O'Meara on 10/08/03 01:49 AM
Speaking of watching files...

A week or so back, I updated a dev instance to HEAD and noticed that (at least) one package was automatically watching all files. I don't recall the package, but I didn't do anything to cause this to happen. This phenomenon continued across service restarts also.

Is there a new *static* setting that was added to get this behavior?

Collapse
5: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 10/07/03 03:51 PM
Actually, the APM index page was changed a while ago to show all packages by default.

And yes, general-comments are required by at least lars-blogger and news, so it will get installed there.

Collapse
6: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 10/07/03 03:57 PM
Well, obviously I haven't installed 5.0 yet. ;)

I don't have a problem with making things easier for users, but I don't think we should frustrate budding developers, either.  That's really my point.

Collapse
7: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 10/07/03 11:02 PM

It seems to me a service is something that would only be used by another application, something that would never be stand-alone, and therefore something that would never be installed by a person except as a dependency.

The cronjob package doesn't fit this definition. It is a stand-alone package. It only has admin pages because it might be too dangerous to allow users to run queries of their choosing anytime they want.

However, if you can still navigate to and install a service package, then it really doesn't matter to me where cronjob shows up in the apm.

Collapse
9: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 1)
Posted by Peter Marklund on 10/08/03 10:02 AM
Randy,
concerning the package watch, that was because of a file that I added by mistake and then discovered and removed.

During development it's quite convenient to have the packages you are working on watched all the time. The way to accomplish that is to put a statement like the following in an init file in your tcl directory:

foreach package_key $package_key_list {
    apm_watch_all_files $package_key
}

Collapse
10: Re: Why is "install application" seperate from "install service"? (response to 9)
Posted by Randy O'Meara on 10/09/03 01:51 AM
Thank you, Peter. That's a neat trick.