[Alexandria-list] Are you alive? Yup!

[Leandro Regueiro]

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Cathal Mc Ginley
<cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org> wrote:
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> On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 18:54:27 +0100
> Leandro Regueiro <leandro.regueiro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> are you alive? is still Alexandria in development?
>
> Hello,
>
> well, I'm still here at least. Development on Alexandria is fairly slow
> and tends to have very long lulls with no progress. At the moment I'm
> working on fixing a few of the outstanding bugs so I can release a new
> version sometime this month. The problems I tend to have are:
>
> 1) I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I don't like releasing a new
> version which I know still has bugs. I should probably just do more
> releases, and more frequently.
>
> 2) The code is getting a little bit "crufty" these days, after being
> modified by several waves of developers who weren't familiar with the
> original design but had to pick it up as they went along. This
> untidiness makes working on the code difficult, and leads to a couple
> of hidden bugs. A bit of refactoring might go a long way here.
>
> 3) Some of the design decisions taken by the original designers
> (Laurent Sansonetti et al)  are limiting the evolution of the program
> (for example, only one copy of a book per library). This is natural,
> it was originally designed to deal with small personal book
> collections. I've been coming up with alternative, more flexible
> designs by means of a ground-up redesign (which I call Palatina), but
> progress has been slow. Once the next bugfix version of Alexandria is
> out, I'll start discussing the new design on this mailing list.
>
> Anyway, my current plan of action is to figure out some of the
> most pressing bugs which can be fixed within... lets say the next week.
> I'll be going through the Tracker on RubyForge flagging the bugs I'm
> targeting for 0.6.4 as Group "Next Release". Then, I'll do a string
> freeze for the translators (most of the translations are up do date,
> and there are several new translations since 0.6.3 too). And finally,
> hopefully, I can push out a release of 0.6.4 around the end of February.
>
> I'd welcome any suggestions to help with the bug-fixing and testing.
> I'll keep the list notified about any progress.

I have a feature request. In my home there are several hundreds of
books. This Christmas I get a list of all the ISBNs of the books, and
I wrote down it on a plain text file with one ISBN per line. When I
add the books to Alexandria, I have to add them one by one, so it
tooks me a lot of time. Could you add some feature to allow adding
automatically all the ISBNs from a given list and let me do another
things meanwhile?

Bye,
                 Leandro Regueiro