Re: Archive unification progress

[Guido Draheim]

Tom Howard wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> 
>>These changes aren't trivial to implement, storing meta-data
>>in XML rather than a jury-rigged plain text format should
>>have been one step in that direction. With that initiative
>>having failed, all bets are off.
> 
> 
> Fair enough.  Excuse me if the answers to the following are really
> obvious and easily accessible.  Some of the info I have found, but I
> don't know how up to date any of it is.  I'm hoping that your answers
> will help me boot unification along.
> 
> 1) Exactly what meta data was the xml supposed to provide?
> 2) What is the exact plain text format at this point?
> 3) How does this differ from the sf archive format?
> 4) Exactly what information do you want in the macro?
> 
> Now I assume you are using some automated tool to generate the html from
> the macro (I'm guessing this is where the haskal is coming in), correct?
>  I've got some experience with php, so if I know the plain text format,
> I should be able to generate xhtml/css, the advantage being that php is
> readily available and can be used from both a web server and from the
> command line.  Do you want me to give it a shot?
> 

Once upon a time, Peter had started to run the ac-archive on his personal
website and I was packaging my macros under the name of aclocal-archive.
I was taking over his tooling for the formatting of the macros, at first
just for my in-house representation, later on the sourceforge flavour of
the ac-archive. - The original tool is named macro2html.cpp (yes, this
is C++) and I converted it later to macro2html.pl (a perl script). Both
files are still visible in the ac-archive.sf.net CVS area on checkout.

The ac-archive website is now being generated through gendocs.pl but the
macro formatting is still done with subroutines relating to the early days
and before any of the xml/haskell work. Surely, you can derive a php
version easily from the perl macro2html.pl variant. I have added some
more markup options (in gendocs.pl) but they are not represented in any
ac-archive macros since I was not aware whether Peters offsite engine
does support the extras.

Anyway, I am not sure whether a live representation via php is even
allowed on the gnu webserver - the gnu webserver seems to be generally
represented in a second CVS area at savannah. This seems like static
pages to my eyes but actually I do not know how the gnu webserver
generation does work.

have fun,
-- guido                 http://google.de/search?q=guidod
GCS/E/S/P C++/++++$ ULHS L++w- N++@ s+:a d(+-) r+@>+++