ZuriHac: possible cooperation

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi Sergey,

Am Dienstag, den 16.03.2010, 16:04 +0100 schrieb Sergey Astanin:
> I am coming to ZuriHac too. I see you listed arbtt on the projects'
> page. I think we could cooperate on this.

great! I’m CC’ing Martin Kiefel who also showed interest in hacking on
arbtt.

> I am not hit by performance yet, but implementing date/time rules is
> certainly necessary. Better error reporting is probably related to
> rewriting parser or rethinking config format (I admit it was not the
> easiest to start with). It would be nice if the config format were a
> little bit more regular, I think it could open a way to creating
> higher level GUI wrapper, and eventually bring arbtt's capabilities to
> those less technically inclined.

I think a lot can be done by exploiting more parsec features. I’d prefer
to use a ready parser library rather than writing a new one from
scratch.

I’m open how to improve the config format. What exactly do you mean by
more regular? I think it would be possible to allow editing it, or a
subset of it, by GUI already.

One could also modularize it more: Some users might want to use the
current categorize.cfg syntax, others maybe prefer writing a categorizer
in Haskell, compiled-on-demand just as xmonad config, while a third
group would edit their (less powerful) configuration using a GUI.

> Nicer statistics/analytics might be useful too. In particular:
> 
> * option to export statistics in a machine-friendly format (tsv or
> whatever), to make integration with third party tools possible

Definately. --output-format={csv, xml, human-readable} sounds good. I
tried to separate the presentation from the generation of statistics in
the code already a bit, so this should be doable quite easily.

> * I have lots of entries like "web:hamsterdb embedded database: foss
> exceptions - Iceweasel", it would be nice to think of a way to deal
> with such entries in a more or less automatic way (groupping by common
> substrings, common subsequences of strings?)

I’m not exactly sure what you mean here, can you elaborate?

> * an optional charting facility (arbtt-chart) may be useful too, but I
> think we should stick to the unix way.

A graphical statistics GUI is definitely wanted. It’s not clear whats
best: Implement it in Haskell, directly or using Chart (maybe after
extending Chart as needed), or implement it in python to re-use the
widgets created for hamster.

Greetings,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
  mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Key: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org
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