[Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server / filesystem

[Felix Breuer]

Hello Joris, hello everyone,

until now the TeXmacs server has been discussed with a focus on
chat/wiki capabilities. I am more interested in the texmacs filesystem
and version control aspects Joris mentioned. So: Joris, what do you plan
in that department?


A "TeXmacs server" would be most useful to me as a system for storing
and managing texmacs trees (or, better even, graphs) that can be
accessed across processes and across a network. Arbitrary programs could
interface with such a server in several ways:

a) via messages passed over a socket (as is the case ATM)
b) via a virtual file system ([1],[2])
c) via the command line
d) by linking with a texmacs server library

Especially d) would be of interest to me. As mentioned before [3] I
would very much like to see texmacs decomposed into several libraries (a
texmacs-tree-lib, a typsetting-lib, etc.) that I could link my apps
against.


Motivation: Recently I wanted to have my computer run some special
purpose computation using a custom algorithm. To this end I needed to
generate some data (which was convenient to do with Haskell) and run my
algorithm (which was convenient to write in C++). I did not have the
time to write a UI and ended up 

* creating a mini-file-format for my data,
* writing serialization/deserialization code in both Haskell and C++,
* staring at the plain-string output of my algorithm dumped into some
text-file and
* visualizing the whole thing using pen and paper.

Now, it would have been so much nicer to have both of my apps talk to a
texmacs server to do all the data-wrangling and then write a texmacs
editor stylesheet to do the visualization for me! (And if I could have
used a texmacs typsetting/graphics library I might even have coded a
GUI.)


This might also be useful promotion-wise: if texmacs is not as popular
as it should be with the LaTeX / Gnome+KDE / XML crowds because texmacs
does everything in a different way, then texmacs has to make it easy for
programmers to do everything the texmacs way!  :)


Regards,
Felix