Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news (http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?package=MDB)

On 09/07/2002 07:24 AM, Lukas Smith wrote:

Then again xml reverse engineering will not be perfect today, but

its

necessary to help adoption.

Yes, but as I said over and over again rushing the first solution that comes to your mind is usually a bad idea based on my long time experience. You may choose to not consider what I saying, chances are that you end up scraping your initial solution and leave everybody

that

relied on it in the cold.

The redesign is mainly related to certain things that are not very easily extensible and therefore prevent moving forward quickly with things like a frontend to MDB/Metabase databases. For example the current way the method resonsible for dumping database schemas works is pretty hard to extend because all of the tags are hardcoded including the intention levels etc. If I for example want to write a comment into those fields when the schema was build using xml reverse engineering I have to ensure that I am using the right intention level etc. It would be much nicer if I would just say "dump this tag at this intention level" because then it is much more transparent. But this is just an example. We have found that a frontend to MDB/Metabase databases needs certain method that currently don't exist. So it's not about changing things that work but more about either extending things or making sure that things can be extended easily. So its not about making changes that provide zero benefit. This is what MDB is about from the onset and has been the reason for most of the changes done to the Metabase codebase during MDB development.

Yes, but you have to realize that certain things will take you a long time to do with perfectionism that you are trying to achieve. Therefore you need to sort better the priorities of what you need to do according to its importance. You are giving more importance to the cosmetics of the code that 99% of the users will never look at, that things like having all drivers migrated. I think you need to do some basic project risk analisis, that consists of basically writing down all the tasks that you want to accomplish, enumerate all reasons that can make the project fail so you can analize and sort by importance of each task so it will not fail because more important tasks were not addressed first.

It is also related to integrating the xml reverse engineering, because you are right the current support is quite rushed. This needs some thought and I very much want you to be part of this (that is why I wrote this email). I have made the decision to leave this "rushed" xml reverse engineering in MDB until I have a better alternative. This is a decision that I have made to increase adoption.

Yes, but I also recommend that you avoid the temptation to reformat or rewrite code that already works. That had certainly consumed you a lot more time than it was worthy. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos