Re: Archive unification progress

[Peter Simons]

Tom Howard writes:

 >> > 1) Exactly what meta data was the xml supposed to
 >> > provide?

 > I meant what was it supposed to provide above and beyond
 > the plain text format.

 - Automatic validation,

 - a large array of available tools to create and maintain
   XML files,

 - documentation in HTML (so that you can use
   sophisticated formatting and hyperlinks),

 - a notion of packages of macros that should be used
   together.

The archive doesn't need that much meta-data. The DTD is
pretty complete as it is.



 >> > 2) What is the exact plain text format at this point?

 >> [...]

 > I must have read this format somewhere, but I can't find
 > it right now. Is it still up on the GNU site?

No, not at the moment.


 > Seeing as you said the XML format is dead, how about we
 > create a unified plain text format [...].

I'm all for it. ;-)

I've studied your BNF with great interest, but I'd like to
defer commenting on it because I believe we should sort out
the licensing problem first of all. Let's get a grip on the
administrative changes, then we will understand better what
kind of meta-information we need to accommodate these
changes. Okay?


 > If we get a unified format and archive, can we look at
 > dependencies as a second phase?

Dependencies are inherently coupled with the notion of
packages, IMHO. Since we don't have packages at all right
now, I think it's a good idea to postpone that topic.


 > I assume by cross-references you mean a link to another
 > macro. Would this just be for dependant macros or for
 > other purposes as well?

You might want to refer to another macro for all kinds of
purposes. Just think of an "@obsoletes AX_OLD_BUGGY_THING"
tag, for instance. It's not a major topic either, though. I
think that functionality would be nice to have, but not
more.


 > What about cron jobs? For http://sserver.sf.net we have
 > the web source in cvs and every hour or so a cron job
 > checks it out onto the web server.

I'd prefer to not update the web site automatically because
a good percentage of commits actually break the formatting
in some way or another. (See az_python.m4 for a recent
example.) If this had been propagated to the web site
automatically, we'd be publishing junk.

Anyway ... no, gnu.org doesn't offer cron jobs to the best
of my knowledge. I could run them on my machine, of course,
but didn't for the reason given above.

Peter