Porting to Drupal 6.x

is anyone interested in porting this module to Drupal 6.x (and 7.x)?

I did a start in this direction, by running it through the Deadwood and Coder modules, but although the conversion seems to have been successful, it did not work. Upon trying to execute the test example provided in the Dript project page, Drupal 6.x fails with an error message which shows that it cannot find the include files (below the dript installation directory, which I have put under sites/all/modules).

Any hints?

Ah yes, the joys of porting! Not for the faint of heart.

Without seeing the code you're actually working with it's pretty much impossible to give you any useful direction except to advise you to use either an embedded code snippet such as print_r or install the developer module to be able to see the values of the variables in your module, especially those relating to the include paths.

If you can provide the exact wording of the error message and the portion of your code in the immediate vicinity of the line number and file that is mentioned in the error message I might be able to help you stumble past this onto your next roadblock :-)

Dear macdee,

Thank you very much for your so fast reply! As a matter of fact, I didn't expect to have any replies anyway -- and so I've not posted more details on the errors I've got, which I will then do ASAP.

This is the first time I use the Drupal forums and, although I'm have had a reasonable amount of experience installing and using Drupal-powered sites, I'm not a "power user", in the sense that I never wrote or tailored any modules. I've also experience with several programming languages, but PHP (or Java, JavaScript, C/C++...) is not my favourite one -- and so this is why I'm so attracted by the Dript module (LISP *is* among my favourite languages).

More soon...

Here is the error I got when trying to execute the Dript test script, after installing the module (automatically converted to Drupal 6.x by Deadwood):

Fatal error: Class 'lisp' not found in /home/maurobio/public_html/test/sites/all/modules/dript/dript.module on line 78

Class 'lisp' is in the folder lisp under the folder sites/all/modules/dript. It seems that Drupal 6.x is not able to find out the include files in that folder (and the one below it, named func).

For convenience, I'm attaching to this message the converted dript module. Hope it helps.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

@maurobio I did a rough cleanup of the files and have at least got it so that it'll print "Hello World" for you. (files attached)

I didn't try testing it past that since I'm not familiar with lisp.

There's a whole bunch of code that still needs cleaning and changing to get everything up to Drupal standards but that exercise I'll leave for you to complete...

Enjoy!

@macdee, thank you very much! At a first glimpse I did already see what have been required to make the module compatible with Drupal 6.x (much more, indeed, than what can be done automatically by Deadwood and Coder... :-().

As I do understand, the Dript module is really a simple LISP interpreter (written in regular PHP), "hooked" to Drupal as a module. That is, much of the code is simply PHP and not especially related to Drupal. But let's see.

Well, I'll test it more throughly and post my findings here. For comparison, I have an "alternate" Drupal 5.x installation on my local machine, so that I can run the original Dript module under 5.x against the converted version running under 6.x

How could this version be made available as "version 6.x-1.x-dev" (with due credits to you, of course)?

Until this project finds a talented and enthusiastic developer to constantly maintain, harden and improve it, I don't think it has much of a future. Unfortunately, as you can see from the issue cue itself that there's never been a big community behind it.

As it currently stands I'm afraid it's mostly an amusing toy. It is something you can use on a personal site where you're the only person making submissions and you're willing to work around the shortcomings, but definitely not something that is suitable for a large scale, interactive site.

From looking at the code in the existing module, there'd be a lot of work involved just to have it accepted as a 6.x module. The coding style of the original author isn't compatible with what the CVS people are looking for these days.

I'm not knocking the author's coding abilities, far from it, he obviously produced an extensive and impressive piece of work. It's merely that there's a lot of lines of code that need to be gone over, analyzed and restyled to conform to Drupal practices. A long and laborious task.

Then you'd have to go over everything once again for security because this project is potentially extremely powerful, being a programming language that's hooked into Drupal itself. There are many, many gates and doors to chain and padlock there.

@macdee, I got your point, no doubt they are extremely relevant. Not being a talented PHP programmer, I'm not in a position to evaluate the coding of the original author, but I do understand the requirement to maintain Drupal modules at the highest possible standards, and I also agree that security matters a lot.

Well, I'll proceed to use it as a "personal" evaluating tool for that matter.

Thank you very much!