[Dxspider-support] patch to accept commands in old style...

[Dirk Koopman]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 10:48 +0200, Oleg Chernyawski wrote:
> > Uh oh !!!!!!
> >
> >> 2) just stop spider and replace 3 files in as it placed in archive.
> >> Restart
> >> spider - and it works!
> >
> > If you are <<VERY>> lucky, Dirk is on vacation, and won't notice what you
> > just said .....
> 
> Do you really think something is wrong?
> 
> All of the original commands are working fine, this is a small addon only. 
> BTW all is published, a lotta people asked for this before...
> 

I am not on vacation, and I have noticed.

Oleg: There is an official way of achieving what you want do - and the
other way.

The other way is replacing the issued files with your own version. This
has the important side effect of breaking CVS and/or (if you use the
CVSlatest.tgz method) overwriting your changed files on upgrade.

The official way (hopefully) gets you the best of both worlds:-

In the /spider directory tree there are the "local" and the "local_cmd"
directories, these correspond to the "perl" and the "cmd". Any files
(like DXChannel.pm) that go into the "local" directory will override the
issued versions. Any commands (such as show/dx.pl) go into the
equivalent place under "local_cmd" will also override the issued version
of that command. 

Sadly there is currently no "local_data" directory. This is currently a
feature which may, now, be verging into a bug. I shall look at this. In
the meantime, if the issued bands.pl changes (and it has not done so
recently) then it will overwrite the modified one on upgrade (every time
if you use the CVSlatest.tgz method). 

However, it must be said that altering DXChannel.pm is probably one of
the last things one ought to be doing as it is the base class (in as
much as that concept is used in the code) for all the channel access and
manipulations. It is one of the files that I tend to alter most when
adding new features. 

Having your own copy to keep up to date is not going to be a trivial job
and inciting less skilled programmers to consider it is, in my view, not
a good idea. 

I shall look at your mods and see whether I can find a way of
incorporating them into the main line. 

In the meantime: I would strongly suggest that, unless you are a
reasonable programmer and understand how the inheritance both of files
and classes in DXSpider works, and also what happens (and why published
changes might not work) on upgrade - you leave this mod well alone.

Regards (and I mean that)

Dirk G1TLH