Xibo

Report version on display list

Asked by Bartek

Hello,

In addition to record last ip address and client config in display list maybe client version should be displayed there?
In big network it could be useful information what clients still need to be upgraded.
Right now we have 25 clients, next two weeks we going to install next 10, and its easy to make a mistake in a 'version' column in excel :)
Maybe green dot for recent clients (+ version in tooltip for example) and red for older ones or something?

Its probably quite easy to implement instead of autoupdate feature. Even if there will be such feature some people (me for example) would prefer updates by hand over vnc to make sure that everything is ok after update.

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Revision history for this message
Bartek (czajka) said : 		#1

Just spotted that version is mentioned as part of client settings :)

Revision history for this message
Alex Harrington (alexharrington) said : 		#2

Hi Bartek

Dan and I were talking about that earlier this week.

It will happen, but we're comitted to 1.0 being a stable series of releases. That essentially means bugfixes only so that you can be reasonably sure upgrading version to version isn't going to break things and the functionallity remains consistent.

That's really important if you're reselling Xibo as a SaaS system or have a large user base who require training when there are changes.

So we will do it, but only if we can find a way to do it with very minimal changes otherwise it'll be a future development in 1.1 or 1.3

Cheers

Alex

--- original message ---
From: "Bartek" <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: [Question #92877]: Report version on display list
Date: 4th December 2009
Time: 10:00:40 pm

Question #92877 on Xibo changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo/+question/92877

    Status: Open => Solved

Bartek confirmed that the question is solved:
Just spotted that version is mentioned as part of client settings :)

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Revision history for this message
Bartek (czajka) said : 		#3

I think that ip/version is quite helpful information that could help administrate existing network. Right now is quite hard to compare Xibo view and excel rows if is there lot of terminals if database.
You could even hide those by default and add some small option in server parameteres to make them visible.
For example as far I could guess ip saving needs 0 modication of client side, and one additional column in database + reading and writing apache/iss variable here, so it should make server unstable by any way. But of course I not sure becouse i'm not a programmer :)

You're of coure right about stable version and bugfix only conception - its normal and good practise in software development.

I've a lot of conceptions about new-shiny-functions that could be implemented in xibo in future, but right now i'm trying to point Your & Dan attention on bugs only, and suggest some small add-ons that shouldn't make xibo unstable (as far a could guess of course - You are author and you know your software, not me :)) and could help in managing Xibo network. I'm using this great software heavily right now (we're going to reach 70 clients in 2-3 months by replacing or current commercial software that really sucks :)) and my posts cointains only spotted bugs and ideas about adding few informations that would make network administration much more efficient in my situation, nothing more. Right now I need only few informations about network that are avaiable somere inside the system enfgine, but now I have dig them by hand every time (for example by reading apache logs and guessing request-client pairs) - new functionality will be nice when current network will reach some high usablity state :)

But as I said - you know better what could be done in stable branch, and what functions have to be postponed to futher relases.

Revision history for this message
Dan Garner (dangarner) said : 		#4

70 clients! It is good to hear about people using Xibo, especially when it is to such a large extent! For someone having such a large number of clients to manage I can see why the information you propose would be very useful.

In the long term there is a blueprint that defines what we would like to do with the client settings which I think you have already seen: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/xibo/+spec/client-settings-central. I have updated it slightly to reflect my thoughts on how it might work.

In addition to that I see that there might be a shorter term requirement to simply display some key network information about the clients. I see you have already created a blueprint for that. I have taken the liberty of modifying it slightly - see what you think. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/xibo/+spec/client-information-central

In our next development meeting this will be on the list of things to discuss... we will be having a meeting before the release of 1.0.5 and of 1.1.0 so it will be up for discussion for both of these milestones. However as Alex has already mentioned - we may decide that it poses too much risk to the stable branch.

Cheers,
Dan