WACS: Futures

Contents

The Junk Yard

 As with many packages released in a (hopefully) usable on day one state, Wacs has been in use and developement on the author's machine for several years prior to it's GPL release. That release project has required a lot of cleaning up, documentation and particular the removal of system specific entries out to a more generic framework based on a configuration file. Many little useful utilities are yet to be cleaned up for public consumption, others will need a re-write before they are completed and ready. The idea is have an area in the SVN repository for these various little scripts. They may not even work as-is but may provide useful clues and ideas for people wishing to work on WACS - hence the name junkyard. The first program in there compares the contents of a directory with images in with those in a spares sub-directory of itself and deletes those which are absolute duplicates leaving any files that are not the same. This is useful if you've obtained the same set twice from different sources via an unreliable file sharing network such as usenet. It'll keep any ones that weren't in the main set or where corrupt in either the main or duplicate set.

Code Enhancement

 As ever with a piece of under-development code, there are many new features being thought about, planning and on the horizon. This section summarises a few of the key ones and provide a list of possible projects to consider if you wish to work on the WACS codebase.

Install

 The current manual installation proceedure is pretty complex. The easyinstall script was the first step down the path to a "works-out-of-the-box" version of Wacs, but this needs much more work to be likely to work on a reasonable set of Linux distributions. We also need a upgrade script which updates the scripts in a current installation without doing all of the installation steps again.

Vendor database

 There is quite a bit of embedded knowledge about how various sites are organised, how to link to them, etc. It would be much better if all this info were in a vendor database containing information on how to get to a model index, a set index, etc from each site. It would also be a good idea to incorporate the 18 USC 2257 declaration information into the vendor database and link to it from the main page. This way, should a WACS site be unprotected either by design or bug, the legal niceties would be fulfilled and the owner would be safer as a result. The design and structure of this database should be driven by the needs to also accomodate features used in some of the scripts due to be placed in the junkyard.

Security

 The new security mechanism is definitely beginning to come together - basic enforcement, login, lease handling, user role and a fairly complete implementation of exclusion preferences are all present. Not all applications that should use the exclusion mechanism are yet aware of it. Initial code has been added to limit the amount of damage "viewer" grade users can do. Again there is more work to do on this. The login screen which adds a temporary lease for that user/host combination is now complete and seems to work; it includes the consent tick box and the preference exclusions requests.

Rating Tools

 At present ratings are added using the SQL command interface. It would be much better if ratings could just be added through the web interface, but this should probably only be open to certain users (ie the owner). The security mechanism needs a re-vamp to allow for this.

New Applications

 There are quite a few parts of the system (like wacsshow, search, etc) which do not cater for video. Some new applications that do so would be a worthwhile enhancement.

Metadata Exchange

 A long term project which I would consider really interesting would be to allow the free exchange of metadata between Wacs users. Information on other web sites that also feature sets by favourite models, attributes definitions and long format set names linked back to the source set id would make importing new sets quicker and more efficient. Of course a protocol and standard format would need to be defined along with some absolute frame of reference for each model and set. Hopefully a developer community around the GPL'd version of Wacs can work towards this goal.
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