[Catalog-sig] UI for managing catalog

[Moshe Zadka]

[Andrew]
> What types of interfaces do we need to support for managing the
> catalog.  A Web-based version, through CGI, is clearly required.

Of course. By CGI, you probably mean "server side code" rather then
really CGI. CGI is an evil protocol, and will die soon anyway. Why
not use a real tool, like Zope?

[Andrew]
> Do we want to require FTP?

No. FTP is an evil protocol, and will die soon anyway.

[Andrew]
> ...it's harder to
> mirror Web pages;

Not if you have WebDAV. Note that you're talking about two different 
things (we might decide to require them both on each CPyAN server, we
might not):

1. Packages mirror.
2. Searching interface.

These do not have to be necessarily related. An easy way to do it is to
have two cookies: "Preferred-Packages:" and "Preferred-Searching:". The
master searching server will redirect to the correct Preferred-Searching
server, which will then use the "Preferred-Packages" cookie to construct
URLs for the correct Packages mirror. We can talk a lot about ways to
do it, but I am pretty much sure it's doable. (I'm a web developer by
profession, so I do this kind of things for a living. You can trust me.)

One advantage would be that there can be fewer searching interfaces (which
is not as high a load on a server) then packages mirror. More, packages
mirror can use either FTP or WebDAV and the searching interface won't
care a bit.

That's talking only about the user side of things -- not the developer.
Note, BTW, that there can be other ways to access a web page then via
a web-browser. Especially if we subscribe to a very rigid set of queries,
it can be done by a Python module.

[Andrew]
> I don't understand how WebDAV would fit into this, and therefore it
> should be left out of the first version.

No! We don't have to use all of WebDAV, but one thing we could use is
that in WebDAV, you *can* get a list of all files in a directory. That's
critical for mirroring.
-- 
Moshe Zadka <sig@zadka.site.co.il>
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