On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Chris Johnson wrote:
Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, NSK wrote:
instead of just hacking the source in order to empty the js file?
echo "" > misc/drupal.js can hardly be considered hacking.
Many hosting services do not provide shell access. Requiring shell commands to do an install or set an option is a hack in my humble opinion.
This was just how I'd do it. Others might want to open the file, empty it, and upload the empty file to their server.
Further thoughts on the broader topic:
We need to find a way to allow much more administrator customization without requiring shell access.
None of the various Drupal admin options currently really depends on shell access.
Too often the reason for not adding admin option to configure something is the valid and good desire to keep the number of admin options to "manageable" size or the smallest size possible. Perhaps what we really need to do is look at ways to make the admin options more manageable and understandable. Much of that is human factors / interface usability work.
We are always interested in people who want to do usability work for Drupal.
I would suggest that admin options be divided into the "usual" set of options and a "power user / config every possible setting" set of options.
I had once suggested the same, but Dries didn't like it. Was some time ago, so he might reconsider this.
Perhaps the latter merely sets lots of values for various variables, so that the person doing the changing is really required to know what they are doing -- the equivalent of editing some of the static variables kept in settings.php.
Yet another simpler possibility is to add many more settings to settings.php for these kinds of things. Then all that is require of the admin is the ability to edit the settings.php file and upload it to his/her hosted site, something they must be able to do anyway to install Drupal. No command line needed.
Then settings.php might have a line that says:
$ajax_subroutines = "misc/drupal.js"; // if blank, JS is disabled.
What we could do is to have variables that are only settable in settings.php, ie
$conf['ajax'] = 1; // if 1 use Ajax
But for the current case I don't see this happening.
Cheers, Gerhard