Hi,
We are planning to use Hackystat (hopefully from later this week) to
collect some research data (general overview of our planned work is to
be found at the links in my signature).
I've been given permission to hand back any fixes that I make to the
existing code base as I do them, so this email is firstly to give an
overview of what I've already done, and secondly to ask about the best
way to pass the changes back?
A build including my fixes can be found at
http://ext.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u0058/, which we will be using as our live
server, but please don't use it to post (significant amounts of) data to
it. I may delete non-sheffield accounts occasionally.
So a brief overview of the fixes so far:
- [Feature] Server Non Standard installation location
In Sheffield I needed to install hackystat to a server with no admin
access to Tomcat, and on a different path (in particular the servlets
are only available in /servlet). I found that to make this happen I
needed to make a few changes to the Kernel, Installer, and the build files.
(also a draft page of documentation at)
http://ext.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u0058/docbook/ch06s05.html
A (nice) feature of this is that HackyInstaller now defaults to the
server from which it was downloaded from, with no further editing...
I'm still testing this feature as I can't think of an easy way to
identify all the hard coded paths - It think I found them all, but I
guess there may be others that I have not found!
- [Feature] Sensor installation in a read-only environment
These changes allow sensors to be installed into a read-only
environment. The changes allow the initialisation of the sensor
properties, however no attempt is made to ensure the sensor exists.
This is a general change so that any sensor could allow configuration
even if the directory is read-only. However each sensor installer will
need to implement the new canInstall method to indicate if the directory
is read only. If it does not you may get a file write error depending on
the implementation. So far I've only sorted out the Eclipse sensor.
- [Bug] Eclipse sensor will not install into alternative plug in
directories
The installer checks to see if .eclipse_product exists, but this is not
in alternative plugin directories. I've changed this to check for the
plugins directory.
- [Bug] HackyCore_Kernel -> Pagewriter.java error reporting
Enhanced the error reporting so that this class is debugable. Corrected
errors in the logger code so that it actually works!
- [Bug] HackyInstaller does not read the context properly from the
config file
When loading settings from the config file the Model does not copy these
into the system properties list (it does if you edit them in the common
settings however) as a result if you change the context, when you first
start up HackyInstaller it fails the initial ping, in Notification.java.
I've added this functionality into hackyCore_Installer->Model.java, but
is perhaps needs refactoring as is a rough copy.
- [Bug] Logs only write to the Catalina log directory.
- [Bug] Settings only read from the Catalina settings directory / or a
known war directory.
Remember I've already fixed these bugs, so there is no need to work on them!
Thanks,
Chris
--
Chris Thomson
Sheffield Software Engineering Observatory
University of Sheffield, UK
http://observatory.group.shef.ac.uk
http://www.shef.ac.uk/dcs/research/groups/vt/research/observatory.html
