I've been using elog for several months now, and one thing that's always
seemed odd to me are the things like max number of attachments and max
attachment size are defined right in the source code, and not in the config
file.  It would seem that it would be simple to be able to define stuff like
that in the config file (and have defaults in case they weren't specified),
which would fix a lot of the recompiling problems - just edit the config file
and restart elog.  Not that recompiling elog is difficult, it just seems like
recompiling for such a simple setting is overkill...

Anyway, just curious.  Is there a technical reason this is not done?

Justin

> source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
> exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

> Actually my report was NOT about this limitation. You have it - it is fine.
> The problem is that I add some 'zombies' or dead files to my logbook.
> 
> BTW is there a tool to check the 'integrity' of a logbook? That all
> attachments are in place,  there are no dead files, etc. I perfectly
> understand that it is not _highly_ desired or needed, but with the two last
> problems (auto-removing of attached files and silent adding a new ones with
> 20+ attachments) I have doubts that our logbook in a good state. And we 
just
> started to use it. And I am still so excited about it!!

Actually my philosophy is not to cure symptoms of a problem, but fix the 
source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

About the integrity, there is no problem. As you might know, the xxxxxxa.log 
files are plain text files. The line "Attachments: xxx" contains a simple 
text list of all attachments. In the above case a few files might be missing 
in that line, but they are present in the log directory. So in worst case 
edit the xxxxxxa.log file manually, adding the file names, and maybe restart 
elogd to rebuild the index properly. Otherwise there is no integrity problem.

> We use ELOG 2.3.5 for Windows with a German language file and have found 
> some new problems:
>
> . Certain strings are not translated.

That has been fixed in meantime.

> . If a user uses the new "password forgotten" function, he receives an 
> email, but after having clicked the URL in the mail, he gets the following 
> error message as simple text, i.e. not formatted by use of the CSS file:
> 
> Invalid URL: Notizen/?redir=%3Fcmd%3DChange%20password%26old_pwd%
> 3DE3ARcjI/&uname=sal&upassword=E3ARcjI/ 

Have you tried the elogd.cfg setting:

[global]
URL = http://your.host/

it might help there.

> . If one could not log in through the button "Login", one does not receive 
> an error message, but will be pushed simply back to the main page, 
> status "Not logged in". (This was as far as we know was also with earlier 
> versions of ELOG.)

You should at least receive a login page. So does this push back occur on a 
wrong username there or how does it happen?

> . If you want to change as an admin the passwords of several users, it 
> would be convenient, to get always back to the page, where you may choose 
> the next user ... but you will be pushed back to the main page with the 
> messages. (This was as far as we know was also with earlier versions of 
> ELOG.)

Agree. Will work on that.

> . But the simple change of passwords for users does not always succeed: I 
> have changed the password for a user A to "anuvis", the next user B should 
> have gotten the same new password, but this time it was not accepted. 
> Message "Wrong password". Might it be, that this goes only once because of 
> an initialisation problem ? I had to edit the password file manually.

Can you reproduce the problem? If so, tell me the exact sequence of thing 
you do and I can try to reproduce it as well, then fix it.

> . Opera browser 7.03 simply crashes, when choosing the direct URL to our 
> logbook, i.e. http://localhost:8080/logbook2. We have set a general 
> password file and a different read password for each of our logbooks.
> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook1 everything is fine. We get a 
> window "Authentication required" and type in simply the read password, no 
> user name.

Wow, your browser crashes? Funny, I never had that. So what does the browser 
say?

> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook2 the behaviour is different. We 
> see the window "Authentication required" appear, then Opera crashes.
> Change of the read passwords did not change this erroneous behaviour. This 
> problem was not with version ELOG 2.3.4.

I will try to install 7.03 and reproduce this, might take some while...

> . NOWRAP tag in Date column
> The date column takes quite a lot of space in the logs overview. As the 
> information is only of secondary importance I would prefer date and time 
> being wrapped like e.g. the contributors name. Of course, I could help 
> myself with a 
 in my language file, but this would force a break also 
on 
> the single message view.

Something like

Date format = %B %d, %Y

in your configuration file reduces the date string length considerably.

> `elconv' is just a simple tool to convert pre 2.0 log files to the current
> format. (Well, after all these confusions, dropping it from the future
> releases won't be surprising -at least for me- ;) You might try some
> well-known text-processing tools ie. preferably awk or perl to make the
> required conversions. But I think using comma or tab as the delimiter is 
not
> suitable due to the content of logs. If all you want is importing them to
> excel/word, you should play with the delimiter options of mentioned 
programs
> before trying a solution.

Hi Recai. I have several requests of this kind. "Want to import/export to 
comma separated text" or "XML". So one option is to extend elconv to handle 
all kind of conversions 1.x -> 2.x, 2.x -> CSV, 2.x -> XML. An alternative 
would be to write some awk/perl scripts as you noted. The disadvantage of 
this solution would be that they rely on the installation of awk/perl which 
is not given on windows systems. But nevertheless, if anyone volunteers to 
write a conversion tool, I would be happy to include it in the distribution. 
If not, I can put it into elconv.c, but that could take until June, given my 
current work load.

> Here is the error:
> 
> Cannot find any ??????.log file in this directory.

`elconv' is just a simple tool to convert pre 2.0 log files to the current
format. (Well, after all these confusions, dropping it from the future
releases won't be surprising -at least for me- ;) You might try some
well-known text-processing tools ie. preferably awk or perl to make the
required conversions. But I think using comma or tab as the delimiter is not
suitable due to the content of logs. If all you want is importing them to
excel/word, you should play with the delimiter options of mentioned programs
before trying a solution.

> I would like to dump mylog files into comma/tab seperated files. Is there 
> an easy way to do it?
> 
> I tried to run elconv, but had no success. Always returns an error. 
> 
> Thanks,
> k. 

Hi!

Same for me.

Here is the error:

Cannot find any ??????.log file in this directory.

THANX,
mm

> > It seems that maximal number of attachments is about 20. When you try to add
> > more, a new entry _is_ added to the logbook but the refernce to it is not
> > added to the web page.
> 
> Uhhh, Mr. "monster of number of attachments" gave it's stroke!

:)  I wanted to post a message with ~200 attachments.

>Well, we never 
> had such large number of attachments so I forgot to put a waring in. The 
> limit comes from 
> 
> #define MAX_ATTACHMENTS  20
> 
> in elogd.c which you can easily increase (as long as you have RAM!) and 
> recompile.

Actually my report was NOT about this limitation. You have it - it is fine.
The problem is that I add some 'zombies' or dead files to my logbook.

BTW is there a tool to check the 'integrity' of a logbook? That all
attachments are in place,  there are no dead files, etc. I perfectly
understand that it is not _highly_ desired or needed, but with the two last
problems (auto-removing of attached files and silent adding a new ones with
20+ attachments) I have doubts that our logbook in a good state. And we just
started to use it. And I am still so excited about it!!

> It seems that maximal number of attachments is about 20. When you try to add
> more, a new entry _is_ added to the logbook but the refernce to it is not
> added to the web page.

Uhhh, Mr. "monster of number of attachments" gave it's stroke! Well, we never 
had such large number of attachments so I forgot to put a waring in. The 
limit comes from 

#define MAX_ATTACHMENTS  20

in elogd.c which you can easily increase (as long as you have RAM!) and 
recompile.