[ww-users] And another change, in the future

[Lee W. <wor...@gm...>]

And secondly, a change in the internals of the system that I want to 
write about before it happens, to allow you to raise objections.

We've been working out the bugs on out McMaster wikis on a change that 
reorganizes the cache directory where the project files are stored. 
This makes it easier for humans to navigate the cache files if needed, 
and removes some redundancy in the filenames.

For the most part, changing to the new system will make no difference, 
as WW will silently move your files to their new locations as it comes 
across them.  The one exception is that existing background jobs will 
not be compatible with the new system, meaning that it won't recognize 
that they exist, and it won't be able to tell you their status or merge 
their files into the persistent project directories.

In case you're wondering: background jobs are listed in a special box at 
the top of your wiki pages, and they have to be explicitly created by a 
user: unless you have a user who's making background jobs on purpose, 
you don't have any background jobs.  You can find out for sure by 
looking in your cache directory (the one that has a subdirectory called 
"persistent/") and seeing if it has any subdirectories whose names start 
with "background_".

So you'll need to make sure all background jobs are merged or destroyed 
before updating your WW installation to the new source code.  I'm 
writing to find out whether that'll be a problem, and whether I should 
roll out the new code at a particular time.  Also, you should be warned, 
because there might be bugs in the code, and you should upgrade at a 
time when there's breathing room to discover and fix them, not like the 
day before a major deadline.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about that.  Otherwise I'll 
go ahead and make a decision.  Thanks!
Lee