[tahoe-dev] help! how do I manage dependencies on JavaScript code?

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

I actually agree with Kevin that visualization is very important. But,
I've realized that was a mistake to be try to squeeze a big new
feature in at this stage of the 1.8 process. We had to commit some
significant changes to download logic after 1.8.0c2 because that was
the only way to fix a performance regression, but now we're going to
concentrate on fixing known bugs and hunting for unknown bugs until
1.8.0 final.

As soon as 1.8.0 final is out we will turn to the very cool patches
waiting to be merged into trunk: Brian's New Visualizer (which is the
topic of this thread), Kevan's MDMF (GSoC), Faruq's multi-introducer
(GSoC), *maybe* some of Yu Xue's advanced cryptography (GSoC) (if Yu
Xue or someone writes some more code to integrate it into Tahoe-LAFS
capabilities).

We have a half-baked idea of how to solve the JavaScript dependencies
problem by making the visualizer code be a Secure Decentralized Cloud
App. :-) Commit Brian's patches to Tahoe-LAFS which cause it to emit
its download status report in JSON, but don't commit any of the actual
JS visualization code nor jQuery nor protovis to Tahoe-LAFS. Then
upload jQuery, protovis, and the visualizer code into the grid itself
and link to it so that the user sees it whenever they look at the
status page. Something like that. :-)

If it works, it might also be an interesting deployment mode for
Josip's Music Player (GSoC). :-)

Regards,

Zooko