Oolite Bulletins

Stating that Factions needs all System OXPs was wrong to begin with. Its wiki page and readme list all dependencies one by one. RS is not one of them.

Should we have a separate wiki page for obsolete OXPs? Probably, if someone wants to entertain a museum. In that case I would prune the OXPs that either clearly state that they were meant for earlier versions only, or that are as abandoned as RS is (i.e. not even a download link exists). For those I could agree to remove their category tag because the likelihood of ever having to touch them again is close to zero.

The broken OXPs section has its place because this is where OXPs go after a new Oolite version is released when they have been found broken. It is a sort of to-do list.

maik wrote:

Those two and a half people who are unable to see the big sticker next to the download link will be helped in the board.

Help, eh? BURN! .-)

There will always be ppl who are overlooking/ignoring the notes, warnings, requirements and readme's, even onscreen ingame messages. It will only give us some ammunition for sarcastic helpful comments.

I agree with your point about the 'to-do' list aspect. I also agree that a museum or archive is the best way to handle the 'dead' OXPs. A record of them should be kept, but not as part of the main OXP section of the Wiki.

I am not totally sure I understand the problem of the categories.

"Broken" OXPs have their own, independent table precisely for the reason of keeping them separate from the working OXPs, haven't they? And no matter how you sort the table for working OXPs, the "broken" OXPs which aren't in this table in the first place, won't get included by re-sorting it, will they? So there can be no confusion. If an OXP is broken, it will never show up in the main OXP list.

That is if Sortable Table of OXPs, Work in Progress OXPs and OXPs with Problems are three separate tables to begin with, which I suppose them to be. No OXP may be listed in more than one of the three tables. If an OXP goes from WIP to full OXP, or gets from full OXP to "broken", it must be moved to the appropriate list, not copied. It has to be completely deleted from its original table.

On another note, one OXP that could be moved from the "broken" table into a museum or archive is External Views.oxp. It lost its meaning in Oolite 1.70.

On yet another note (and here we enter the realms of personal decision-making and taste), it wouldn't have occurred to me to place RS in the Systems category. It is admittedly hard to place, because it contains so much. Personally I had probably settled for the Ships category.

It's the categories that are causing the problem here. RS is categorised as a 'system' OXP, so if you sort all the system OXPs together it appears in the list. My view is that it shouldn't.

More precisely, if you do not use any of the tables on the OXP List but open the category page (automatically created, alphabetically sorted) for System OXPs in this case, then there is no distinction between broken and non-broken OXPs. The visitor has to actually click on the OXP link to find out that it is broken. Shock. Horror.

Fringe case. Not worth writing another board post about IMHO.

I took up the suggestion to create the [wiki]OXP Attic[/wiki] and moved some of the broken OXPs there. I left those on the main site where I felt that they will be dusted off eventually. The ones on the attic have been stripped from their OXP categorization. Feel free to rummage around.

A practical solution!

The Wizard has waved his wand.

Interesting stuff happening in this thread.

Maik you are indeed a wizard.

Couple of comments

-the label on broken oxp pages, the writing should be bigger and the word WARNING: added to the beginning other wise good label

You came up with a GOOD IDEA the attic is! Just that when I think of the attic I think of a place not where I put things that have lost their relevance but just storing things that are useful but seldom used and that could be sold easily at a garage sale. Might be better for oxps that have a use to somebody and a museum is probably a better name for a place for historical items that have lost their relevance. If something could be modified and brought back to life then it should be in the attic.

Oxp's should be only on one table at a time and moved when needed.

If the infamous Realistic Shipyards remains on a table by type it should be listed as both broken and ships(it's all about ships). Too many bad vibes I detect on this one.