DW -> IJ Conversion

[parnassian]

Hi guys! So there's a guide to convert IJ styles to DW, but I'm looking around and there doesn't seem to be any guide for converting the other way. I've made some progress but when I go in to compile my custom layer I'm getting a ton of errors. The current one is "can't declare usage of non-existent property" (property use layout_type; is the italicized line). I'm picking at it slowly but I thought I'd reach out to see if anyone has any experience with converting from DW to IJ and any finicky things I need to change in the raw code.

If it helps, I'm trying to convert Basic Boxes. Thanks in advance!

Comments

[denise]

Oof. I don't think anyone has ever put together any kind of a list or guide for that, and it's a quite frankly daunting thought: we've been extending and expanding S2 to support new site features, browser features, etc, for 15 years. It's a lot easier to do IJ->DW because we kept the version of S2 that IJ uses (we call it core1.s2), as an option so as not to break backwards compatibility for LJ and IJ styles, but every DW-native style uses our own version of S2, core2.s2. Because we kept the old version around, the only changes you have to make to use an IJ style on DW are the ones where we absolutely couldn't avoid making changes to core1.s2: we've tried our very best to keep core1 as close to "the version we inherited from LJ" as we can (which is why a whole lot of site features won't work or won't work well in core1 styles), but we've been making all kinds of changes to core2 because it didn't exist until DW existed and so we don't have to maintain as much backwards compatibility.

To backport a core2 style to core1 (and specifically the version of core1 running on IJ: I'm not exactly sure which version of which code Squeaky is running but I'm pretty sure it's from well before the time when we forked from LJ) you're going to have to pull out every reference to every change and every new feature we've made in 15 years and also translate a bunch of properties, functions, etc, from their core2 versions to their core1 versions, and that is a fairly daunting amount of work. My honest advice is to take an existing IJ core1 style and start hacking at it until it looks and behaves as much like Basic Boxes as you can get it to: that would probably be about 8000% less work.

If you're really determined, though, I would start with looking over the earliest-commited version of Basic Boxes, the version of Tabula Rasa that existed at the time, the version of core1.s2 that existed at the time, and the version of core2.s2 that existed at the time and start comparing them all to what you've been working on and to InsaneJournal's core1.s2.

It still may not get you very far, though, and it's going to depend on how much patience you have and how well you understand S2.

[sporky_rat]

Trust denise on this.