Re: Fw: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Manolis Mavrikis wrote:
> > Manolis wrote:
> >
> > > BUT the optional step of copying your old files across is inaccurate !
> > > Just replacing the directory will not work because there are other
> > > things hardcoded in the .m files not to mention that if you do a text
> > > substitution you ruin the file (I think) you have to change them
> > > manually
> > > with Maple ! (I 've written a procedure to help myself doing that that
> > > but it's not finalised yet)
> 
> > Can you explain in more detail what goes wrong if you do the text
> > substitution?
> > Gustav
> 
> Maybe I am doing something awfully wrong but the problem is that the subject
> files (the .m ones at least) because (I guess) they are written from Maple
> as a blob when you change the directory using a ascii manipulation the size
> is messed up and (I am still guessing here... I am maple ignoramius) when
> Maple tries to read  them again it cant.

I have noticed this effect. Things are ok if the new directory name has
the same number of characters as the old one. Then the size of the file
isn't messed up. For a while, I used this trick, but these days I develop 
on one machine and copy the directories across to another machine (this 
works without problems because I have the same directory structure on the 
other machine), basically by a tar zcf ... and tar zxf procedure. The only 
thing is that I need to unhide the quizzes on the machine I copy to. Also, 
the records get copied across in this process ... this is generally ok,
since it's only records from me and other staff who have been testing
the quiz before release to the students, but if necessary I can get in
and with the appropriate permissions simply remove the record directories
that correspond to me and other staff. I'm sure I could do this in
a cleverer way, but since I'm generally only releasing a few (generally
less than 3) at a time, this procedure is not too onerous.

> Hence what I do .. is open them with Maple, change the RootDir and save them
> again. And then I have to recompile as well (by the way I can't find this
> recompile all at the admin suite of the subject)

I think if you wrote a program to simply trash all the .m files (this 
would make quizzes and questions hidden again), and then recompile and 
unhide questions and quizzes ... this would get around this problem.
If you have the right permissions you could do this at the UNIX level.
It would be nice to have an automatic tool ... I think it would need to 
be non-GUI, so that quizzes and questions that were hidden at the beginning
of this procedure remain hidden after the procedure.

  Regards,
  Greg