[LOGGED] Is there a text-only format for izy files?

[peuclid]

I often use git (github or other) to collaborate when developing code. It's so nice to be able to see what changes a collaborator has made before merging into the project.

I imagine there are many cases of people collaborating on Isadora projects and wonder if there is some way of seeing what someone else has done.

If there is already a way to do this, I'd love to hear about it.

If not, I would propose having some text version of izzy projects that they can be exported to, perhaps one big json file or one json file per scene or whatever set of files might make sense to describe everything in a project.

It would probably make sense to have the layout/display of the nodes be separate from the description of the nodes. I expect this would be a pretty big project, but could go a long way toward allowing groups of collaborators to work in parallel on large projecs.

I apologize if this is anathema to the Isadora philosophy, but with so many types of users, perhaps there are other coders out there who want some way of seeing a textual version of a project, so we could use tools such as `diff` to see where changes may have occurred. Also, with a standard format like json, there can become inifinite opportunities to automate construction of complex scenes.

Of course automating layout could be another big challenge, but that could be another fun project (simulated annealing to automate a layout using soft constraints). I'm happy to chat offline sometime

[mark]

@peuclid said:

I often use git (github or other) to collaborate when developing code. It's so nice to be able to see what changes a collaborator has made before merging into the project.I imagine there are many cases of people collaborating on Isadora projects and wonder if there is some way of seeing what someone else has done.If there is already a way to do this, I'd love to hear about it.

When I created Isadora more than 20 years ago, my instinct was to store all of the data in binary form as it is far more efficient in terms of file size than storing it as text, not to mention faster to read. But, in the last year or so, especially as Isadora has been promoted on the Office Hours series, this has been brought up by several users like yourself. We already have a feature request about this logged in our system.

Unfortunately, to change the program so that it can save all of the data structures as text is an absolutely massive job. Every single part of the program that saves to, and reads data from, the Isadora document would need to be modified. After that, we would need an immense testing effort to prove that it every single one of these modifications works perfectly.

When you consider all coding and associated testing, we're talking about a feature that would delay the appearance of Isadora 4 for at least three months and possibly more. At this moment, that amount of delay is simply too much. Once Isadora 4 appears, we can consider again the number of users it would impact vs. the time and effort required to make it happen.

I wish I could give you a better answer, but that's the best we can do at the moment.

Best Wishes,
Mark

[peuclid]

@mark

Thanks for the explanation. There's many layers of data structures that need to get serialized and deserialized. Not knowing the internals, it's hard to know what it would take, so that's very helpful to hear from you about it.

Lots of luck on v4. I look forward to it!

Bernie