[kepler-dev] [Bug 4282] - Duplicate of ptolemy.gui.Top

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4282





------- Comment #6 from welker4kepler at gmail.com  2009-08-27 09:33 -------
Christopher - 

An override is not a bug. That you entered it into Bugzilla does not change
that.

You may be right (or not) about the value of being able to switch between
Kepler to Ptolemy. I should note, however, that if we take the ability to
switch from Ptolemy to Kepler out of the module manager, then the ability to
switch from Kepler to Ptolemy must be taken out as well. It would be an
untenable situation for a user to switch to Ptolemy and not ever be able to get
back out.

It is my view that you have decided to take a personal preference of yours, and
make it into a bug. Which is fine, since the way we use Bugzilla does, as you
know, accommodate feature requests. The point is, the desire to run Ptolemy
from the Kepler build system may be small, but so is the importance or level of
concern we should devote to this issue. Whether Top is overridden or not is an
implementation detail that is of concern to developers and not users.
Furthermore, I am sure that developers could easily fix any issues that arose
due to future changes in the functionality of Top.

That said, I am fine with the solution of removing Ptolemy as something that
can be invoked from the Kepler build system. It would allow me to refactor the
build system code and make it somewhat cleaner. I am also fine with the
solution of having a hook written into Ptolem

However, I vaguely remember Bertram using this feature to explore some
functionality that was implemented in Ptolemy but not Kepler. I am not sure how
important it is to him.

A final point. Upon reflection, the solution that Matt suggests of writing a
hook into Top is probably not a technically feasible solution. After all, we
are not talking about extending Ptolemy. We are talking about changing the
behavior of Ptolemy so that the module manager can be invoked from the menu bar
of any JFrame that extends Top. Therefore, I think the two feasible solutions
are to either (1) keep this override or (2) remove the ability to run Ptolemy
from the build.