[OH-Dev] Tar exploration

[Tarashish Mishra]

Hello Sean,

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:18 PM, S.Z.W. Lip <s.z.w.lip at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Sunu!
>
> Wow! I am *very* impressed. I played through the whole thing and I really
> liked it when I got detailed feedback when I uploaded ghello-0.4.tar.gz by
> mistake. I also like the way you have done hints. Great job!
>

Thank you.

>
> I'd be happy to take a look at the code review. One question: is the
> intention here that you will be submitting these changes to the Oppia
> mainline, or are these meant only for the openhatch code base? Either way,
> I'm totally happy to look at them, I just wanted to understand the context
> in which I should be reviewing them.
>

The changes  can live on Oppia mainline if you are okay with it.


> Regarding your questions:
>
> 1. That's strange, sorry to hear that. I checked, and the tar exploration
> you sent me last time doesn't break even after the latest commit, so it's
> probably an issue with subsequent changes. Do you have any debug
> information? For instance, is the request coming to the server in the first
> place? Or, is the server responding to the client, but the client is, for
> some reason, failing to show the feedback or any subsequent prompt? Are
> there any errors in the chrome console?
>

No, I don't get any errors in the terminal or the chrome console. And I
have done some inspection and the server is sending out the right feedback.
The problem is on the client side. Note that the precious version of tar
exploration didn't have the tarfilereadinput widget.

>
> 2. We can't do this yet (our support for customizations in feedback is a
> bit primitive). I just added it to our issue tracker (in the future, please
> feel free to add stuff here too!). Do you need this urgently?
>

It's not the top priority now, but somewhat urgent I'll say.

>
> The milestones list looks good to me. I have one small question: what does
> "the scroll-to issue" mean? That might be something that is better to fix
> upstream.
>

During the exploration the window scrolls automatically. The scrolling is
somewhat inconsistent at some cases and you have to adjust the scrollbar
manually.



> It also strikes me that this is one symptom of a more general issue, which
> is that we need to manage two separate codebases and the syncing between
> them. So I want to raise a few points, and invite your thoughts on them:
>
>    - What sorts of extensions are you planning to make to your version of
>    the oppia codebase? I think it's important for there to be a way for you to
>    'git pull' without having to do lots of merges, so figuring out an
>    architecture which enables you to customize things 'safely' would be a good
>    idea. In particular, I would strongly advise not editing core oppia files
>    if you can help it, but use the extensibility frameworks for rules/widgets
>    that we've provided. Also, if we have some idea of what customizations
>    you're doing, we can keep them in mind when developing, and possibly
>    implement extensible frameworks for them if needed.
>    - Another reason it would be good to chat about custom modifications
>    that you might want to make is that, if they are sufficiently general, we
>    might want to do them on the oppia codebase rather than the openhatch fork
>    of oppia. This means you will have less custom code to maintain, and less
>    chance of breakages (since you would essentially have more people
>    monitoring the build and in a sense it becomes our problem). 'Sufficiently
>    general' has quite broad scope here -- e.g. we want to work on improving
>    our reader and gallery UIs, and I'd also be perfectly happy to take things
>    like the TarFile object and rules in, if you're willing.
>    - Another facet of this is that I worry we might break you when doing
>    pushes (see point 1 above). In general, we ensure that every push we do
>    results in every single oppia test passing. This, however, means that new
>    code needs to be accompanied by tests, otherwise the fact that the tests
>    are passing doesn't really give us much security. We still need to add more
>    tests to the core Oppia frontend, but I am also thinking here of things
>    like the tar widget -- which we can only really guarantee not to break if
>    there are tests for it. That's more or less an (important) FYI, and I guess
>    the main question here is: do you have a strategy for when you update your
>    repo from ours?
>
> I agree. We should try to have as much common code as possible.

>
>
> All these boil down to minimizing codebase skew, and so I have a
> suggestion: what do you think about making a comprehensive list of the
> changes you want to make to your fork of the codebase, and then I go down
> that list and suggest which ones oppia would be happy to accept?
>
Yes, great idea. We'll add stuff we want to the issues list and tag them
suitable, so that you can go through them easily.


> Then, for the ones I say we can't or probably shouldn't accept (e.g.
> pinging a specific openhatch server to get a u/n and p/w), I can at least
> try to suggest to you the best way to implement them using our existing
> extensibility frameworks, or we might try to build new frameworks (like we
> did for parameters) if we feel that the need is a general one. The benefit
> here is that it minimizes codebase skew, makes it easier for you to
> maintain your fork, and lets me know about what you're doing; the
> disadvantage is that it might take more time, you might need to wait for me
> to act on that list (which I will try to do quickly, but if there are
> back-and-forth cycles needed to try and clarify what exactly you are doing,
> there will be natural delays), and significant changes to oppia will need
> to pass code review (and, soon, always include tests -- we really want the
> codebase to be stable). All this is just a suggestion, and accepting it is
> totally up to you and Asheesh!
>

Sounds great!

> I also wanted to give you a couple of updates on what we're thinking of
> doing because I think they might be of direct interest:
>
>    - We are looking into making oppia explorations really portable and
>    playable anywhere, so that they can be accessed by just including an <oppia
>    .../> tag in a page, and having a <script src="oppia-player.js"></script>
>    at the bottom of the file, so that the process is as simple as including
>    jquery. We're also looking into having oppia explorations be loadable
>    directly from yaml/json files (that may be stored in github repos), but
>    this is further down the road. Just thought I'd mention it in case it is of
>    interest.
>
> This is really interesting, both the player and exploration import/export
from files. This (import/export) is something we will use in the future.

>
>    - We are also looking at adding tags to the gallery view and a search
>    feature, since categories can be a little restrictive.
>
> Tags are useful too. Earlier Aheesh and I were talking about how we can't
have a single exploration in multiple categories. Tags solve that problem.


> Let me know if you have any feedback on these -- in fact, I feel like it
> would be good to get feedback in general about the stuff you're planning to
> do, so that we can take your needs into account when planning. We're having
> a team meeting soon to decide on our direction and main objectives for the
> next three months, and I can give you more info on that after it happens --
> but, briefly: our core goal is for anyone to be able to learn anything they
> want to effectively and enjoyably, so we're looking at a vision where you
> can play these explorations anywhere on any webpage and you can build giant
> epic compelling stories out of them, or make a wikipedia of explorations,
> or something, that makes the entire learning experience really
> reader-driven and fun. And I'd be delighted to hear any feedback you have
> on this, or other things.
>
> Also: *Asheesh*, could you please add me to openhatch-devel? I thought I
> signed up a while back but I have not been getting any emails.
>
>
The mailing list is at http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/devel.
But yeah, I just checked my inbox and I think I am not getting emails from
the list either.


Thanks.

-- Sunu
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