adp001 posted at 9:24PM Mon, 23 March 2020 - #4384218

@JoEtzold Interested in working on this? I tend to quit Poser, but this would be an interesting project to do.

@ADP That's a not so bad idea cause as noted a bit before this could be a bigger project. But at the moment I see no chance in starting this cause as earliest in one month I will find time for this again. At the moment I'm changing a lot from sold software like MS-Office to public licence software like Libre-Office, equal Photoshop to Gimp, C4D to Blender, etc.. So a lot of learning and building up experience. In parallel I want to reduce my PC's from 3 to 2 plus a Raspberry as a small NAS means a lot of hardware reconfiguration incl. Linux move and upgrade to 64 bit. And than it's time to become familiar with Python ... ok, a programming language like others but also a little bit other. Even to have correct leading spaces not to disturbe loops and such stuff will be a new experience (who had that damned idea... :-( what was sooo bad on while-wend, if-endif ... ) ... ok, I ever have written good readable code with spaces and line breaks and such but now it's essential and needs to be checked with errors. And a lot of functions have slightly or total other names means a lot of searching and looking into help files.

At the moment I'm on the way to bring Libre Base to fly with the Access-Video-MDB and to get hand on the old stuff via Paragon-Backup (again). If that will work I could make a short overview about my ideas in that stuff as far as done in VB or foreseen like even a first concept of the foreseen database structure. By the way I will stay with a relational SQL-based database like SQLite or MariaDB which even can be nativly read and worked by Libre-Base ... a great advantage to have a GUI incl. report building. My first approach with that stuff is even to have all that packages for Poser or even only 3D-formats sorted correct into a database. And than looking what comes next, unzipping, sorting on harddisk or even changes in single files.

I had a first look to the couchDB and if building some web-stuff it is a interesting approach (ok, "interesting" a bit like used by TV-cookies for taste ... ) but I see here no need for web-basing or browser-using and than json like xml is not very handsome ... my opinion ... Even the concept to omit locking is not what I tend to find good especialy cause for our purpose I see more or less a one user database without locking problems.

Ok, timestamp at a file in my experience is the worst method to decide if modified or not. That can be seen with the Poser files by bondware at the moment. I'm just downloading the complete stuff again cause dates are changed but by quick check most are identical in size so big question if something has changed. And on Windows the timestamp consistency is not really a safe point. So I only know two safe methods version numbers in filename (depends on the file creator) or CRC. So I guess this could or should be a theme. And storing a original package parallel to a actualized package could end up in a big storage waste and more trouble to have things sorted ... ok, disk capacity has become cheaper by the time but never-the-less no need to waste. I for example have more than 20.000 files only from freeware and there is no sense to conserve the originals if reworked to a directly unzipable file. One of the needs to have first a well-done and safe database to catalogue and refind stuff ...