Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server / filesystem

[Felix Breuer]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 11:47 +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Hi Felix,
> 
> On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 07:24:43PM +0200, Felix Breuer wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> I mainly intend to implement what is necessary for myself in order to
> manage my own articles. This includes version control, hyperlinking and
> some simple facilities for searching.

Version control alone would be a very interesting feature. How do you
plan to implement that? In particular, how do you plan to store the
different revisions of a given document? As version-tagged copies of the
entire file or as a set of diffs? 

Do you plan to implement a diffing mechanism that is aware of texmacs'
trees? I found this the biggest drawback of using standard version
control software with texmacs documents: that they treat the documents
as plain text files instead of structured trees.

> > 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.
> 
> Sure, these possibilities are all very interesting. However, as I said before,
> I do not have much to spend on these issues (even though I would like to).
> Nevertheless, the server is written in a very modular way, so it should be
> easy to add new services which do the things that you want.
> 
> Recall that the server is currently written in scheme,
> so it is not really a library to which you can link.
> On the other hand, it is very easy to add new services as a module.

If the server is written in scheme, is there a set of scheme files I
could include in my own scheme program to modify the tree of a document
hosted by a texmacs server?

> By the way, did you make progress with the litterate programming stuff?
> If you have some working code, then I am still interested to include it
> into TeXmacs. The approach which just uses comments with TeXmacs text
> should not be hard to implement.

I didn't have the time to do some real coding after the inital
brainstorming/drafting session with David Mentre. He did start, but I
don't know how far he got. I do plan to work on this, but it will
probably have to wait till after my diploma thesis is finished.


Felix