TheYeti1775 said:
Would it be too much to ask for an import feature for say datasets from 5.10, to whatever they have at v6?
If it can convert it yippie even better. But I would be happy with it being able to read it even if it slows it down.
Generally, most of the tokens will not change. Thus if you have written to what was documented in 5.10, the conversion can be automated in the majority of cases.
It can't be completely automated for a few reasons:
- There are actually ambiguous tokens in 5.10 - they work, up to a point, but once pushed into corner cases, there are ambiguities that can be encountered. We have changed those tokens going into 5.12 (often by removing them in favor of other tokens)
- There are a lot of *really* old tokens (back to the 2.0 days) that were never properly removed from the code and are often undocumented. We have done some house-cleaning, in order to ensure we do not have to support those in 6.0 (though many didn't function anyway, we want to ensure people explicitly saw the warning messages)
- There are tokens that are not at all strict in how they are parsed. They are practically free-form, and that makes it *really* hard to write a new parser that guarantees the integrity of the data going into PCGen (rather than interpreting at runtime and consuming errors). Those tokens we have changed to "tighten the rules" (in particular, ADD and AUTO had major syntax changes).
So there *are* a bunch of token changes from 5.10 to 5.12, and the old format of those tokens that changed _won't_ work in 6.0.
However, we do have a prettylst perl program that will do the vast majority of that updating for you - the only things it can't do are the ambiguous items (VERY rare) and some of the much older, undocumented tokens we are removing in 5.12. It should work very well if you are using tokens as they appear in the docs. You can visit our PCGenListFileHelp Yahoo! group if you try prettylst and encounter problems with conversion to 5.12. If you have lots of personal datasets, I'd be very interested to know what doesn't cleanly convert, so we can understand if that conversion can be automated.
One last note: There is a running issue with a few tokens that we need to figure out how to change the format before 6.0 (CHOOSE and REMOVE in particular). This may be a last minute rush of features into 5.11/5.12 or it might mean a 5.14. I don't know that answer yet. However, the vast majority of 5.12 tokens will work in 6.0 (and presumably can be supported for the forseeable future). The exceptions are the bold entries on
http://pcgen.wiki.sourceforge.net/Token+Change+Proposals+for+5.13+Alpha plus - perhaps - PRERACETYPE (which has a really yucky interaction that has been in cleaning mode since about 5.9)