Some feedback

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Samstag, den 15.06.2013, 18:16 +0100 schrieb Waldir Pimenta:

> As I mentioned in my previous message, here are a few ideas/questions
> that popped up as I used arbtt recently, about which I'd like your
> opinions:

First of all, thanks for your feedback; it is very much appreciated.

>      1. It would be nice to have an index page at
>         http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/ so that it would work as the
>         main home page for the project, instead of
>         http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/. If this idea
>         is supported by others, I'd be willing to make such a page,
>         including some nice design :)

A proper homepage for it would be nice. At some point I planned to
extend http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects to have separate pages
for every project, with more content, but never got around to do so. And
maybe it is a good idea not to bind it too much to my personal homepage
and let it live on its own.

But I’d put such a homepage on a domain of its own (say,
http://arbtt.nomeata.de/). If you’d enjoy creating a homepage for it,
I’ll definitely put it there! Just create a new darcs repo and give me
access to it, and I’ll set it up. For that purpose, you can assume that
the user documentation is also accessible at
http://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/.

>      1. Some window titles aren’t decoded properly with arbtt-dump;
>         Special characters appear as escaped sequences -- for
>         instance, \226\128\162, (which corresponds to a bullet, •
>         in html), \226\132\162 (which appears at the end of the name
>         of skype windows) and \226\128\148 (which is the character
>         between the document title and the filename in the evince pdf
>         reader). Is this done on purpose, or could arbtt-dump output
>         the corresponding unicode characters directly?
>      2. arbtt-dump seems to use True/False for indicating which window
>         is the top one. Since the output of arbtt-dump is plain text
>         anyway, would it be a good idea to use a more explicit marker,
>         such as an Active/Inactive string? Or, if the format that the
>         command outputs is a Haskell data format (say, like JSON),
>         maybe formatting that part as a named variable then, like e.g.
>         { active=True }, could work for the same effect (making the
>         output self-explanatory).
>      3. Speaking of JSON, it would be nice to have an option to dump
>         it as JSON! It is already a quite similar format, and would
>         make parsing by other programs much more accessible (I
>         believe). Thoughts?
>      4. Could arbtt-dump have some options for filtering how many
>         entries to dump? e.g. last hour, last day, last n entries,
>         etc.

All these related to arbtt-dump, which is not meant to be a user’s tool.
It main purpose is to debug and to convert the binary format to a
non-binary format. I’d like to see arbtt-stats the main user tool to
interact with arbtt.

On the other hand, maybe I should revise this opinion. So far,
arbtt-stats only reports that somehow aggregate the data; there is no
way to view the raw data directly, and the name arbtt-dump really sounds
like it should do that.

So maybe arbtt-dump should get new options: The same sample-selecting
options that arbtt-stats supports (--filter, --exclude, --only), and in
addition a --format parameter that allows to switch from the „internal“
format to some human-readable format or some programming-accessible
format (e.g. JSON).

An option to more easily select the last n samples or the samples of the
last n minutes/hours/days/week/months/years would probably be handy as
well.

Do you have a concrete usecase in mind? I prefer to develop features
when there is a need for it, rather than adding features that are only
potentially useful (and otherwise just add bloat).

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim Breitner
  e-Mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de
  Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de
  ICQ#: 74513189
  Jabber-ID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de
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