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Under review

zenCBR

Richard Leonard 8 years ago updated by eduo 7 years ago 5

Not sure if this is inline w/ the purpose/direction of this forum, and if Admin/Sysop yanks it - NP....


I was googling/searching/hunt'n'pecking a way to "clean up" my comics files, and almost universally "ZenCBR" is mentioned....


my only problem with that is that it is a "windows" only app.

(my server farm or weed patch - - is all itty bitty ARM boxen... Pogo Plugs,Seagate GoFlex, Raspberry Pis, and so on..I think there is one intel box w/ Ubuntu - everyone else is Debian Jessie, or Embedded Linux (MontaVista?)

workstations in the house are all Macs, Android phones/tablets, iPhones/iPad, ChromeOS, and whatever my son is running on "his" beastie this week...

......


The author has posted the Source, and declared it FOSS! (this is a good thing)

Unfortunately, the author, Shannon Larrat, passed away 16 March 2013... (almost never a good thing).... (if you don't have a copy, you may want to get one soon if you are interested..)


http://www.zentastic.com/blog/2012/01/30/zencbr-comic-book-archive-maintenance-utility/


(who knows how long it will remain online...)


So, I am thinking about rewriting the app. At this point maybe as a set of Bash scripts, or Java like Ubooquity, my son suggested Go, or python- (which would run on more than Linux boxen).


For those who have used it, what features/functions should it have?

my goals so far -

make it modular,

(each menu option can be simply "dropped" in or "pulled" out w/out major headaches)

attempt OS agnosticism...

(write once, run anywhere - - <snerk> )

avoid GUI, keep it text - (simpler, potentially faster),

SPEED - - - make each function go as fast as possible... or faster

SIZE - - KEEP IT SMALL (both code and memory footprint)


Thoughts?

(is this a waste of time, is there another program that does what ZenCBR does ?)


Rich


Under review

Good idea !


I agree with you on that it should stay a fast command line tool.


Also, I like ZenCBR because there is nothing to install (no Java VM, no Python runtime...).

So I guess Go (although I'm not sure it compile to native executables) or even pure C could be a good choice.

Of course Java and Python would work too.


Let us know how it goes !

im going to check it out and see if it will run with mono, since its opened up and now running on linux

I would definitely be VERY interested in this. ZenCBR is my go to. I run it on a windows box across my network, but I would love to run it native on linux. :)

Definitely did not run with mono. Someone with Dev skills will have to modify or port to Linux :'(

I had never heard of ZenCBR and I'm missing in what way it's useful (I am very obsessive about organizing my comics, so that may be why I don't see much point in it) but just from looking at the source code I can see it's done in PowerBasic.


This means you can just continue it in PowerBasic or port if to a similar Basic alternative (I personally use Xojo, but that's a preference).


PowerBasic, like Xojo, have been around forever and are still popularly in use today. You can grab the source code and compile directly to executables that don't need any additional installs or runtimes and for smaller programs they're a lot simpler to manage than almost anything else out there.


The whole source code is a tad below 2 thousand lines. It should be easy to port it to another Basic compiler. While I would use Xojo (which compiles to win, mac and linux) you could port it to freebasic, which is free and compiles to Linux (and aims to be compatible to QuickBasic, same as PowerBasic, which may make porting easy)