Re: proclamation of intent

[Rick Macdonald <rickm@vsl.com>]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Paul Traina wrote:

> How about if you drop a branch tag for gnats 3.x in now (in case folks want
> to do later 3.x releases, and commit a snapshot into the head as 4.0-alpha).
> This will give Rick and Ken a chance to change their front-ends to work with
> 4.0's commands, and we'll just screw the old network protocol.

I guess I'll buy that. Just make it the best you can, and we front-end
writers will go with it.

A few minor comments. I think you already have this issues "done right":

The fields and enums should have human-readable Help strings (multi-line
allowed?), and these strings need to be available to the client.

I would like that all configuration stuff is read and parsed by GNATS, and
when sent to the client, it is formatted and written by GNATS (gnatsd)
such that the client just parses it and doesn't have to check for errors
for remove comments. By this I mean that GNATS shouldn't just copy a gnats
admin file to the output (gnats used to do this; I removed a few cases of
it). This also makes the formatting of the info more consistent for
parsing by clients.

I think you should send out your proposed format of configuration info
that will be sent to clients that ask for it. I think TkGnats (me) and
gnatsweb (Ken and Matt) are the only people using this feature. I'd hate
for you to code a bunch of stuff only to have us bug you to change it
afterwards! Tcl and perl are great at parsing, but we might as well make
it simple for ourselves...

...RickM...