[ckan-dev] Advances and questions on datadeck

Thu Jul 21 14:19:09 UTC 2011

2011/7/18 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> 2011/7/17 J. Félix Ontañón <fontanon at emergya.es>:
>> With the aim of starting to work with local data packages some more
>> advances has been done:
>> 1.- A manager reads  ~/.local/share/datadeck searching for local data packages
>> 2.- A Data package's info is read with datapkg python library
>> 2.- Local data packages can be browsed in the GUI
>
> Wow amazing. I think we could convert some of the conventions like
> .local/share/datadeck into stuff in data package docs. I've tried to
> integrate some of this:
>
> <http://wiki.ckan.net/Data_Package#File_and_Directory_Format>

In this stage of datadeck development i'm just trying to provide a
Linux functional version of datadeck.
However, I'm trying to keep the developments as much
multiplatform-friendly as I can: note that .local/share/datedeck is
for linux only, so further developments would replace that constant
path with a function that could detect your S.O. and choose a right
path.

I mean, maybe the best is to reflect one path for every supported
platform on Data_Package spec.
In the linux case, .local/share is not arbitrary, is what FreeDesktop
says on BaseDirectory spec[1] (specificaly the $XDG_DATA_HOME
environment variable) about user application's data.

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

> Note that datapkg / dp does not yet fully implement this spec ...
> (code is here if you wish to update:
> <https://github.com/okfn/datapkg>)

I really think I could contribute here. Added to my personal TODO :)

>> An easy way for testing is just use datapkg for download packages into
>>  ~/.local/share/datadeck
>> Commits has been pushed on "localpackages" branch at
>> https://github.com/okfn/datadeck
>
> At the moment Aron has concluded it isn't worth having a separate
> datadeck repo from ckanjs. Is it possible for you to push your stuff
> into a datadeck (or datadeck-localpackages) branch of the ckanjs repo:
> <https://github.com/okfn/ckanjs>

Sure! But there's no datadeck branch on ckanjs git repo. May I create
that ckanjs branch and push my stuff there?

>> Some doubts for further advances:
>> * Due to the fact that datadeck may be used to deal with local
>> packages, all the js and css files must be available offline. Aren't
>> they?
>
> Yes, that's a good point and we've moved to that model in ckanjs. If
> you use the ckanjs repo as per previous suggestion this should
> therefore be solved.

Great!

>> * I've started using datapkg's facilities for reading info about data
>> packages. Also I think datapkg could be used to deal with the download
>> and uploads to ckan. Is ckanjs ready for dealing with download/upload?
>> Which are the limits between ckanjs and datapkg?
>
> So ckanjs use pure javascript and requires a) the server to have
> relevant CORS headers (see ckanjs readme) b) you to use a modern
> browser that supports CORS.

Wow, i'm not an expert on js but I think I understand

> If the python datapkg library isn't too big a dependency then let's
> stick with that (and for local operations there isn't much of an
> alternative). By the way if you want to hack on it the code is here:
>
> <https://github.com/okfn/datapkg>

Datapkg isn't such a big dependency. In order to provide a
fully-functional version of datadeck soon i'll keep using it.

>> Next steps will be adding some operations on local packages.
>
> Great.

Cheers!

> Rufus
>
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-- 
J. Félix Ontañón Carmona
Manager

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