Change of plans: Review UIs and thumbnail rendering
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Christian Hammond
Oct 13, 2012, 12:09:53 PM10/13/12
to reviewbo...@googlegroups.com
Hi everyone,
So there's going to be a change of plans with review UIs and thumbnail rendering. Realistically, the dependencies are just too complicated to really be able to support for either PDF or Doc files. The only options we have, it seems, either requires compiling/installing a bunch of native packages (many of which are not suitable on a server due to dependencies on X11, or would have to largely be hand-compiled, which most people won't do), or a third party service that either won't allow commercial use or will charge per conversion.
I'm going to suggest we drop both PDF and doc files. Instead, there's two useful review UIs we can focus on that are under our control.
1) Plain text files with spell checking. (We have a branch we can push that has support for spell checking)
2) Marked up text-based files (Markdown, Restructured Text)
And then there's another useful feature that doesn't exactly fit into our architecture just yet, but you can still build the functionality independently. That feature is image diffing.
Image diffing takes two images and shows, in different ways, what changed. It'd be very useful for when we start uploading binary files.
See https://github.com/blog/817-behold-image-view-modes for an example.
I think these projects will be really useful and we won't have the kinds of problems we were having with the other ones. We also keep our dependency list down and limited to Python modules.
Sound okay?
Christian
--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com
So there's going to be a change of plans with review UIs and thumbnail rendering. Realistically, the dependencies are just too complicated to really be able to support for either PDF or Doc files. The only options we have, it seems, either requires compiling/installing a bunch of native packages (many of which are not suitable on a server due to dependencies on X11, or would have to largely be hand-compiled, which most people won't do), or a third party service that either won't allow commercial use or will charge per conversion.
I'm going to suggest we drop both PDF and doc files. Instead, there's two useful review UIs we can focus on that are under our control.
1) Plain text files with spell checking. (We have a branch we can push that has support for spell checking)
2) Marked up text-based files (Markdown, Restructured Text)
And then there's another useful feature that doesn't exactly fit into our architecture just yet, but you can still build the functionality independently. That feature is image diffing.
Image diffing takes two images and shows, in different ways, what changed. It'd be very useful for when we start uploading binary files.
See https://github.com/blog/817-behold-image-view-modes for an example.
I think these projects will be really useful and we won't have the kinds of problems we were having with the other ones. We also keep our dependency list down and limited to Python modules.
Sound okay?
Christian
--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com
Tina Yang
Oct 13, 2012, 12:19:13 PM10/13/12
to reviewbo...@googlegroups.com, chi...@chipx86.com
Hi Christian,
Does that mean that pdf and doc will still be uploaded and attached as inline file attachments like any other binary file but we will not provide any thumbnail rendering or review UI for them?
Tina
Christian Hammond
Oct 13, 2012, 12:43:03 PM10/13/12
to reviewbo...@googlegroups.com
Right. It's just as it is today, where any file can be uploaded. We just won't have any special view of them.
I still want to do it down the road, but I think we'll need to come up with some licensing deals, and that's far beyond the scope of this project.
Christian
--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com
I still want to do it down the road, but I think we'll need to come up with some licensing deals, and that's far beyond the scope of this project.
Christian
--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com
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