[hobbit] And now?

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 09:03:13AM +0200, lars ebeling wrote:

> So, what happens now, when "we" have come this far with
> hobbitserver. Is it time for the hobbitclient?

hobbitclient is definitely something I'll be looking at soon.

But I'd like to have a bit more real-life experience with Hobbit
server before plunging ahead with the next major project. And there
are still things to do with the server - probably also some bugs to
fix, as new users begin doing things that we haven't tried yet.

I've been working on some new useful stuff today. It all started out
with a bug in the handling of the "trends" column data that can crash
Hobbit (if you're bitten by this, try adding the "--no-meta" option to
the bb-larrdcolumn command in hobbitlaunch.cfg). While debugging this,
I decided that maybe a better way would be to just generate the
"trends" and "info" column data on-the-fly, instead of pre-generating
them every 15 minutes.

So now I've dropped the bb-infocolumn and bb-larrdcolumn tools, and
instead that information is generated only when someone actually
requests this information. That means it will always be up-to-date,
and it causes less load on the Hobbit server.

Unfortunately, it breaks compatibility with BB - but that is a price
I'm willing to pay. 

As a bonus, I also found out that it was easy to implement "default"
settings for entries in the bb-hosts file (e.g. you can define a
default for stuff like the DOWNTIME settings). So all in all it's been
a productive Sunday.

> It has been very fun and nice to take part of this, since I'm
> sitting all alone at home making it.
>  
> Thanks Henrik and all others.

Glad you enjoy it - I sure do.


Regards,
Henrik