[CF-Devel] "cleaned-up" CFJavaEditor testversion

[Mark Wedel]

Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      in reply to Michael Keuchen:
     
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     Hi,
     
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     the new directory structure is o.k.,
     
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     although I still don't know why there
     
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     should be a CFJavaEditor.jar in CVS .
     
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      I'm glad that you are content with the new structure.
     
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      You are right that the jar is not a must-have on CVS.
     
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      However, there will always be people who don't know
     
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      how to compile the sources. I just want those to
     
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      have a working version of the editor while they can
     
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      look at the sources and figure how to compile them.
     
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      The jar is not that big, so it shouldn't cause trouble.
     
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      Maybe I can leave out the arch-resource files from
     
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      the CVS-jar (they're available in extracted form).
     
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      Then it is really small.
     
     
  That probably makes more sense.

  Note however that presuming official editor releases are made on a somewhat 
regular basis, the need for a packed jar in CVS is probably reduced.  Those that 
just want to run the editor could get an official release and not the CVS 
version (this is actually more likely in any case, as it is typically easier to 
download the official releases, since you can get them via web/ftp, and don't 
need the cvs software installed).

  Now there is still certainly the potential of something being done in the CVS 
version of the editor that someone wants right away, but they are 
unable/unwilling to compile for whatever reason.  That seems somewhat unlikely. 
   In such circumstances, a release of the editor could be made then.

  There really isn't any reason why the editor, server, client, maps, etc, need 
to be released at the same time.  In some cases, it makes sense (eg, something 
like item_power or body_.. added to server, sort of need new archs to go with 
it).  But for the most part, I just release them all at once just so that I use 
that time to do so.

  As a side note, it would be really helpful if there is a build script or make 
directive or whatever to make these official releases (similar to the make 
archive feature in the server/client).  I see two probably releases:

standalone editor:  Contains jar file, archetypes, images, and other bits 
necessary to create maps, all in teh right place so easy to run for new users.

Source release:  Contains the source, but not the other bits.  As I think about 
it, I wonder how much this is needed.  It obviously makes a lot of sense for 
server and client to be distributed in this form, because it is impractical to 
provide binaries for every system.  But since that jar binary above should run 
on every system, unless someone is doing work (or wants to recompile for some 
other reason), most people probably don't need a source.  And people can always 
get the source through cvs.

  OTOH, the website does track number of downloads, so I suppose we can monitor 
that and see if people actually bother to download the source version of this.



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     A problem I encountered is that sometimes -
     
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     with other memory-consuming programs running
     
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     and only 64 MB RAM - the program crashes in
     
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     the options dialog.
     
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      The editor consumes about 40 MB of RAM constantly, so
     
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      running it on a system with 64 MB is really on the edge.
     
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      I also noticed that the JRE unfortunately is not
     
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      behaving clever when it runs out of memory.
     
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      On the other hand it is indeed slightly suspicious that
     
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      it crashes in the options dialog and not, say, in the
     
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      attribute dialog.
     
     
  I noticed that for myself, I run the editor with the command line that gives 
it more heap space (-Xmx128m) - the java on my system by defaults only gives it 
64 MB.

  That 64 MB of heap is low end for how much it needs for the work I'm doing. 
My system has the ram to spare, so running it with 128 mb heap definate helps 
things out.