- \n
- uses the cxml klacks<\/a> system to pull the information I wanted out of the file in one pass<\/li>\n
- uses cl-ppcre<\/a> to parse the username out of the darcs author string, so authors “Ryan Davis <ryan@acc…” and “ryan@acce…” both get displayed as “ryan”.<\/li>\n
- uses adw-charting<\/a> to chart patches per day into a png<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The result was less than spectacular:<\/p>\n
![\"darcs.png\"](\"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/darcs.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe chart looks pretty nice, but its lying horribly. My data set didn’t have explicit zeros for days without activity, so the line goes from one active day to another, telling all kinds of lies. My favorite is the 2.5 patches it says I pushed on 1\/11. The other fun one is that Russ shows up in the legend, but his one patch isn’t visible at all, because there was only one data point, and you need two points to make a line.<\/p>\n
What is really appropriate here is a bar chart. Adding explicit zeros is a waste of time and RAM (among other things), so I opted for making a bar chart type. After many more hours of coding, I changed with-line-chart to with-bar-chart and re-ran my program:<\/p>\n
![\"darcs1.png\"](\"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/darcs1.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMuch better. There’s a few rendering problems, but the data is shown alright.<\/p>\n
Adding support for bar charts was actually really easy, it was going back and reworking my amatuerish code that took most of the time. My big accomplishments:<\/p>\n
- \n
- deleted a lot of code by using with-accessors<\/a><\/li>\n
- made all usage of x\/y points go through 3 functions: make-point, x, and y, allowing for easily changing the internal representation of points in the future<\/li>\n
- removed some slots from an object, replacing it with a few functions to calculate the desired value<\/li>\n
- added a few more generic functions to support bar charts<\/li>\n
- reduced the size of the legend<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
After working on the line chart code for awhile, adding bar charts was trivial: one class that extends line-chart, one macro to mirror with-line-chart, one method to draw bars instead of lines, and a couple of helper functions. I was really pleased with how easy it was to add the different graphing mode.<\/p>\n
Of course, giving another dataset exposes more problems:<\/p>\n
![\"darcs2.png\"](\"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/darcs2.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThat’s for clbuild, and there are a few issues apparent here:<\/p>\n
- \n
- when more than one bar is shown for one day, it draws them next to each other, which makes it hard to tell where on the bar is on the x-axis<\/li>\n
- the legend wanders off the edge<\/li>\n
- the month\/day labels aren’t very descriptive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I think I’m going to solve the first two issues by allowing a summarize mode, where less significant series can be aggregated into a single “other” series. This is how I see a lot of other programs solve it, so I’ll give that a shot. I don’t think that will completely solve the first issue, but should alleviate it a little bit.<\/p>\n
The last issue I solved by making a function to show patches by month instead of by day:<\/p>\n
- uses cl-ppcre<\/a> to parse the username out of the darcs author string, so authors “Ryan Davis <ryan@acc…” and “ryan@acce…” both get displayed as “ryan”.<\/li>\n
![\"darcs3.png\"](\"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/darcs3.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"darcs4.png\"](\"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/darcs4.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n