Thus spake "Brent Easton": > > > >On 4/10/2007 at 12:26 PM Joel Uckelman wrote: > >Thus spake "benw_h": > >> OK thanks - it was my brother that tested it, not me, and he said he > >> couldn't get them out. I'll check to see if he was just being lazy ;) > > > >Here's a question for module designers: > > > >Would you prefer > > > >(a) a selection in a menu in the editor which purges unused images, or > >(b) automatic purging of unused images when a module is saved? > > > >(b) could lead to data loss if someone neglected to keep the originals > >of images. On the other hand, you should *always* keep the originals > >anyway, and you'd have to remember to use (a) for it to be effective. > > > >Is it common practice for designers to store their sole copy of module > >art inside their modules? > > Absolutely not! >
Hmm. I have a story from my days as a phpWiki developer which gives me pause. By default, we stored the wiki pages in a file which was written to /tmp. The reason we did that was because it was the only place we could be sure that the web server could write files, and the wiki needed to be able to write a new page database file the first time it was loaded. That is, we wanted to make it easy for the user to get the wiki working; they could move the page database afterwards. Recognizing that this was a bad place for users to store their page databases long term, we put warnings in every conceivable location to the effect that "DO NOT STORE YOUR WIKI PAGES IN /tmp! THEY MIGHT GET DELETED!" If you had your wiki set that way, a big, unsightly box with a thick red outline appeared at the foot of every single wiki page, telling you that you should move your page database somewhere more permanent. We made it so that anyone who had read the install docs, read the README, edited the config file, or even looked at a single page in the wiki he'd installed could not have failed to pass his eyes over this warning. Despite that, a few times a year there would be someone posting to the users list who lost his whole wiki because he never moved it out of /tmp, had kept no backups, claimed never to have seen our warnings, blamed us for it, and thought we were a bunch of bastards for destroying his data. Now, in the case of VASSAL module designers, I'd like to think they're a more reasonable bunch and so we wouldn't have this problem. On the other hand, in our case, data loss is also easily preventable... so... Maybe a compromise option would be to check for unused images on saving a module, and prompt the designer for whether they should be retained if any are found? That way, it's semi-automatic, and we get the benefits of both methods. -- J.
