Re: Archive unification progress

[Peter Simons]

Tom Howard writes:

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

You'll find the DTD at:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/dtd/acmacro1-xml.dtd

If you ignore the XHTML-import stuff at the top, it's just a
few lines. The main tag is:

  <!ELEMENT acmacro
      ( name
      , synopsis
      , version
      , (author+)
      , summary
      , description
      , m4source
      )>

  <!ATTLIST acmacro category
      ( am_support
      | c_support
      | cross_compilation
      | cxx_support
      | f90_support
      | installed_packages
      | java_support
      | misc
      ) #REQUIRED>


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

The plain text format is the one your macros are marked-up
in too, right now. It supports the tags @synopsis, @author,
and @version for meta-data. All other "dnl ..." text is
documentation, lines that are indented are block quotes.
That's it. ;-)


 > 3) How does this differ from the sf archive format?

sf.net has some experimental extensions (@copyright?), but
I'm not sure what exactly those are and what they do. Guido,
do you have a description of those tags somewhere?


 > 4) Exactly what information do you want in the macro?

Originally, I wanted a macro to contain all information
necessary to implement the procedures described in:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/policy.html

Most of all, I wanted to allow dependencies and
cross-references between macros. Packages of macros have
been a missing feature ever since, too.


 > 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?

Yes, the software I use is written in Haskell. It reads the
marked-up macro files and generates pretty much everything
you see on-line at www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive at the
moment.


 > 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?

I definitely welcome any help! I just think we'd need to get
a grip on the markup format we'll use in the future first.
If there ever was a chance to make changes and improve
things, it would be now. ;-)


 > What specifically is preventing unification of the two
 > archives?

We are using different tools, have different priorities,
already have different contents to some degree. I doubt
we'll unify the two archives (as in: make sf.net obsolete)
any time soon. The best we can do is to make sure both
archives have the same content -- and even that is
difficult, because that objective greatly limits the changes
either one of us can make to the software.


Guido Draheim writes:

 > 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.

You are right, www.gnu.org does serve only static pages. All
web contents is checked into CVS at Savannah, then it shows
on the site some time later. No PHP, no CGI, nada.

Peter