2009/12/7 Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu>: > On Dec 6, 2009, at 6:40 AM, tmb wrote: > >>>> I'm sorry to say, but the way I see it, there is really a serious >>>> problem with Sage notebooks right now. >>> >>> Please, please, fix it. I've never had any of the issues you're >>> describing, but it sounds like you have a lot of reproducible bugs >>> on your machine. >> >> These are the bugs/limitations that I'm running into: >> >> -- I can't easily move around notebooks by hand because they are >> stored in numbered subdirectories (as opposed to named text files) >> -- URL links to notebooks aren't stable (downloading, deleting, and >> re- >> uploading a notebook changes its URL) >> -- publishing notebooks requires manual interaction with each and >> every one of them >> -- uploading of large backup files isn't working reliably and there is >> no command line tool for doing this outside the server >> >> Are you saying you can't reproduce these bugs/limitations? > > It sounded like you were having to regularly backup and restore huge > collections of worksheets due to bugs in the notebook, which is what I > was referring to. I've never had to do this. > > The limitations listed above are real, though your usecase has > obviously found them more constraining than mine. (As for uploading > huge files, I've had reliability issues using HTTP POST once I pass > the 10MB barrier on a wide variety of server and browser combinations, > which is probably one of the reasons most commercial photo upload > sites provide flash or java based uploaders rather than using http...) > Hooking into this command from outside the server could be very useful > (though doing so while the server is running would be difficult the > way things are now.) > >> (There is also some bug somewhere that occasionally corrupts and >> duplicates multiple notebooks under some conditions, but that's >> secondary to me since bugs like that are always going to exist.) >> >> Fixing these would require changing the way notebooks are stored on >> disk, the way notebooks are named, and the way URLs are generated. I >> understood you to say that you consider the current layout of the Sage >> notebook directory to be consistent and correct, so I'm assuming you >> wouldn't accept changes that alter it. Did I not understand you >> correctly? > > Moving the default out of the .sage folder by default would probably > not get accepted, but that wouldn't really fix your issues anyways
It used to be outside of the $HOME/.sage folder (that was my original design). However, a *lot* of people found this really confusing and didn't like it. The default sage_notebook.sagenb directory is in $HOME/.sage because that is was users clamored for. On OS X, I think it would be reasonable to consider moving $HOME/.sage to $HOME/Library/Sage, since that's where program config/data directories live on OS X, e.g., my $HOME/Library has directories in it like Mathematica, VirtualBox, TexShop, etc. Then on OS X the default Sage notebook would be located in $HOME/Library/Sage/sage_notebook.sagenb By the way, all this notebook discussion should really be on the sage-notebook mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/sage-notebook > (and you can store the files in whatever folder you want right now). > Making the "admin" account special would require putting "if > user=='admin': ..." checks all over the codebase, which would probably > be a tough sell. Making notebook IDs that are not simply consecutive > integers would solve nearly all of your issues above, and I think a > lot of people (myself included) would appreciate that. Either short > names or globally unique identifiers (or some combination of both) > would be a step forward. It's a step forward to *abstract* away how the actual worksheets are stored. Users should ideally not have to think about this, beyond "stored on filesystem" or "stored in a database" or "stored on a remote database". I will implement a "label" system for worksheets though, so that in addition to a title, each worksheet can have a user-specified unique label. This worksheet metadata will be used for cross-worksheet referencing. This is similar to \section{The Introduction}\label{intro} in LaTeX, and also resembled how webpages have a URL (coming from a filename), but also a title in the <title> tag of the <head> part of the DOM. If a user tries to create two worksheets with the same label, they will get an error and a pointer to the other worksheet with the same label. Hyperlinking between worksheets will uses labels. If a user changes a label (this will be allowed but *discouraged*), then references to it will be automatically updated (though with a confirmation dialog). -- William -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
