[pilot-db-list] few things

[Yedidyah Bar-D. <di...@ta...>]

Hello all,

First I'd like to say thanks to everyone working on pilot-db. I think
it's a great piece of software.

I installed it on my brother-in-law's m103, as well as on pose on linux
with his rom. It mostly works well. I do have a few issues/questions.
I did not search the archives before sending this, only skimmed through
the first 20 messages (two months) to get the feeling of the list, so
feel free to ignore already-discussed issues.

1. I translated the UI to Hebrew. You can get the file at
<http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~didi/iw.rcp> (I did not know if it's
considered polite sending here attachments, so I put it there).
I did not translate everything, mostly the commonly-used things as
well as the ones easy to translate :-). If there is interest I do not
mind spending a few more hours on polishing this, but I think it's
already good enough for inclusion in a next version.

2. The "large DB support" didn't work very well for him, so for now
I disabled it (compiled with '--with-vldb=0'). IIRC, it also wasn't
that much faster - and it _is_ an issue for him, having a 1000+
records DB with around 20 fields (still to change, but num of records
will not get smaller - it's his todo list). How experimental is this?
Is it going to become stable soon? Should I help debug this? Can I?

3. Searching for Hebrew phrases is a bit weird. When using one kit of
Hebrew support, the one he got with the palm (HarelHeb 3.5, IIRC), it
only finds things if they are at the end of a field. When using another
support kit (a 2-week temporary license from www.kalanit.co.il for
what seems like a newer version of the same HarelHeb, but not sure),
it works just fine. Is this reasonable? Is there anything pilot-db can
do about it, or is this only the foreign-language support's job? I
did grep the source and found it's MatchString, which calls
*Glue* functions. Are these part of the foreign-lang support?

4. Since it's too slow for daily work, he uses the memoexport plugin
for the daily tasks, and uses that, using pilot-db only for longer-term
planning. Is there an easy way to export at once all the records displayed
by a specific view/filter? I guess no. It sounds to me as something that's
generally-useful - to make all the one-record plugins also available from
the listview, making them operate on all the records. Does this make sense?
Or is the right thing writing another plugin that will be specific to this
(which he will probably need anyway, since he wants it to set also the
category etc.)?

5. I spent some time on editing the DB on a PC. I mostly want to do this
on linux, so dbeditor isn't my first choice. I tried to hack palm-db-tools
into exporting and importing filters (and eventually hoped for all other
data), but after spending on this around 10 hours, not getting it working
and deciding it's too hard to debug, I decided to quit. Instead, I searched
and found a small tool called par (7th google hit searching for 'par'),
which lets you extract the appinfo to a file, each record to a file, and
create a pdb from such files. So I intend to write a script that will
do this:
export and keep the appinfo
pdb2csv to file.csv
edit the file.csv (with openoffice, or maybe mysql+some web UI?)
csv2pdb
export all the records from the new pdb
create a pdb from the records and the saved appinfo

I verified that this theoretically works, but did not make thorough tests.
Should it? Is this a good way, considering no tool will follow closely
enough the development of pilot-db? And, BTW, isn't something written in
some higher-level language easier to write? E.g. things like
datascript or DataWorkshop? I know this isn't pilot-db-related, but
palm-db-tools seems dead to me.

6. Not terribly important, but transferring it to/from the palm takes
quite a lot of time - around 45 seconds, for a 170KB file. For comparison,
db-iw.prc itself, which is larger, takes much less time (not sure, I think
around 13 seconds). Is this reasonable? Is it because of the many records?

7. There is a bug, that sometimes, when pressing the down-arrow or up-arrow
icons on the buttom-right, in the "record view" (is this the name?), it
crashes, requiring a soft reset. Pressing PgDn does work, so that's what
he does for now. I tried for some time to debug this with pose and gdb,
but did not really get anywhere. It says:
"DB (1.1.0) called SysFatalAlert with the message:
"leakdetect.c, Line:188, addr"."
and gives control to gdb, but I can't see too much - 'where' says
(gdb) where
#0  0x1001d8b2 in ErrDisplayFileLineMsg ()
#1  0x00091b88 in ?? ()
#2  0x0008955c in ?? ()
#3  0x0007b770 in ?? ()
#4  0x10066b08 in PrvSendEventToForm ()
#5  0x10069f2c in FrmDispatchEvent ()
#6  0x0006f670 in EventLoop () at main.c:201
#7  0x0006f8a6 in EditViewGetFieldHeight () at main.c:715
#8  0x0006f3e4 in CheckMinVersion () at crt0.c:69
which does not help much. I tried to also put a breakpoint in
leakdetect.c:188, but also didn't get much further. How do I debug
pilot-db? Is there some tutorial somewhere?

I hope this isn't too long! If you want further discussion to be in
single-issue-threads, fine with me. If I am supposed to subscribe before
sending, fine - but I can't promise I will spend much time on "real"
work.

Thanks a lot anyway,
-- 
Didi