[Maf] 'Update Archive' Feature?

[Christopher Ottley]

Angus Veitch wrote:

> I'm just wondering if there is any plan to implement an 'Update 
> Archive' feature in MAF. 
> ...
> I realise that this could currently be accomplished by saving the 
> modified pages with "File>Save Page As" and then manually updating the 
> archive with a zip browser.  But a one-step automated process would be 
> preferable.


I do have a plan for an update archive feature. There are more pressing 
things currently though, like getting MAF to work properly in FF 1.1 
alpha and fixing some bugs which are blocking the 0.5.1 release. The 
plan I have for the update archive feature is to include a version 
subfolder. When a page is opened from an archive there would be a 
special context menu entry enabled entitled "Save as new version". The 
original saved page will then be placed in the version subfolder 
(indicating the date/time it was replaced). The newly saved page would 
then be the current version. Older versions of MAF will ignore the 
version subfolder, keeping compatibility. MAF also stores its meta-data 
as RDF and I had also planned to add an additional RDF file for editable 
properties such as comments, categorization etc. In the project plan for 
my Nariva search engine, I have as a planned feature, the ability to add 
user defined document properties. That's not going to happen soon 
though. The update archive feature is targeted for the 0.6.0 release.

I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would like to 
maintaining MAF. To keep everyone up to date with my plans, for the 
future 0.5.2 version I'm starting the migration of MAF away from the 
script insanity. I hope to be using the nsIZipReader interface to 
extract and open MAF archives by 0.5.2 and by 0.5.5 have a nsIZipWriter 
interface in use via a C++ XPCOM component with Allister's help. 
Somewhere between 0.5.2 and 0.5.5 there should be an added preference to 
save a thumbnail image of the page saved (useful for my Nariva search 
engine). By 0.5.7 I should have stream converter interface 
implementations of both MAF and MHT files. This would make code reuse 
even easier and hopefully allow things like <frame src="page.mht" /> to 
work.

Regards,
Christopher.