[Chicken-users] New svnwiki features, updating galinha installation

[Alejandro Forero Cuervo]

It's that time of the year again, when I update the Svnwiki
installation in Galinha to roll out a lot of exciting features and
break everything in the process!  Woo!

So please be patient these days if the wiki update process stalls.  I
will be monitoring it closely and, if things break, I'll try to fix
them as soon as I can (feel free to send me a private mail notifying
me of breakage, though).  I have actually started to add tests to the
Svnwiki code and its eggs to try to avoid this situation in the
future; I have defined a total number of *drumroll* 83 tests, which
clearly doesn't even begin to scratch the tip of the iceberg, but hey,
I'll just keep on adding and adding and adding.

So here are just a few features that I'm very excited about.  They are
not available yet (or not entirely), but they'll soon be, once the
roll out is done.

1. Redirections to documentation about definitions.  If a file in the
wiki has a “<procedure>(foo bar hey)</procedure>” or similar (eg.
:s/procedure/macro/), the symbols will be registered in a database.
Whenever someone accesses /foo in the wiki, the access will get
redirected to the appropriate file and anchor.  For the time being I'm
ignoring the case where the are multiple definitions for the same
symbol, but it shouldn't be too hard to present a list of all and make
the user pick.

2. Generation of code from a wiki file.  The idea is that if you embed
code in a wiki file and mark it somewhat (pass a “filename” parameters
to the <enscript> tag), files will be generated with the embedded
code.  The example would be http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/xc and it's
associated http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/xsvnwiki-enscript/xc/xc.
Also http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/embedded-test and
http://chicken.wiki.br/stream-ext.  I'm excited about it, I think I
will actually start storing my eggs directly inside the wiki.  Of
course, I'll be reverting changes as appropriate and manually copying
them outside the wiki to make releases (I call this process “blessing
[the public branch]”).

3. Extraction of tests from wiki files.  I've tweaked a bit the
“<examples>...</examples>” functionality.  If you pass a
“filename=foo” parameter (to the <examples> tag), your example will be
included in foo.scm using the syntax supported by the embedded-test
module that I created.  An example of this would be, again,
http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/xc.  Look for the string “Examples:”
there: the examples are rendered as usual.  However, they are also
included as tests in the xc.scm file.  If you do this, your example
should look like this:

<examples filename='foo.scm' testgroup='name-of-function-tested'>

<example>
<expr>(name-of-function-tested 1 2 3 4)</expr>
<result>10</result>
<resultcmp>=</resultcmp>
</example>

<example>
<expr>(name-of-function-tested 1 2 3)</expr>
<result>12</result>
</example>

</examples>

The <resultcmp>...</resultcmp> part is optional.  I expect to
*eventually* (this code is not yet ready) use that to generate a list
of tests and then, for those that the admins bless, report on the wiki
page their status (pass or fail with X configuration at Y time, etc.).

4. While not specific to the Chicken wiki, I think the email
functionality (http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/svnwiki/mail-spec) may
have a good medium-term impact in how people use the wiki, by making
dialoge about particular pages through the wiki a lot more useful.

Note that this is a significant update of the Svnwiki version and a
lot of its dependencies.  We were previously running a version built
in 2007-10-31 (spooky, a halloween version!) on Chicken 2.731 with
sqlite 2.8.16, whereas now we'll be running on Chicken 3.4.0 with
sqlite 3.2.1.  All the depended-on eggs have also been updated to the
latest versions.  So, yes, it's likely that things will break.

Thanks for your patience and suggestions.

Alejo.
http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/