I’ve been writing the conversion script to pull the arachadmin database out of MySQL and into PostgreSQL. Along the way I’ve fixed some problems I hadn’t noticed, so there will be at least one final update of the MySQL export on figshare. I will commit the postgreSQL versions as a separate figshare document. At the very least this will avoid confusion – one document if you want the legacy mysql and a different document for the maintained postgresql. Getting this to work will probably close a number of the tickets in the arachadmin tracker. Note that the associated wiki has a more-or-less complete coverage of the tables as of last August. Expect an update once the database conversion has settled out.
Another advantage of moving to pyramid is the hope that the arachadmin editor will be in a state to distribute as a package – set up to run with Python 3.5. Install postgres, the package, and the database from figshare and anyone should be able to browse a clone of the backend database. A small step from ‘open source’ towards reproduciblity.
I plan call the new version of the editor app ‘arachcurator’. I was planning to make the initial github commit this week, but since pyramid is promising that version 1.6 will come out of beta in a week or so, I’ll wait for that and build from that. Changing the name is both more accurate (it does very little administration, but lots of curation) and means it won’t share a name with the database itself. Perhaps I’ll change the name of the database when I commit it to figureshare (perhaps ‘backend’ term from spider anatomy).
An Arachnolingua Blog 