I've been doing some stuff related to DocBook and
Jade. Dealing with JadeTeX's way of work is not the
best thing. I was thinking about implementing some stuff
based on the ESIS output...
The ESIS output seems to be better to parse but I don't
know if handling this kind of information is the best thing
to do. The ESIS output has a simple structure to parse:
(para
Text
)para
means the beginning of a paragraph, the text within it
and
the end of the paragraph. Although it is simple, this is
also a simple example. Structures can be very complex when
nested (e.g. a table with spanned rows and columns).
My problem, while writing this tool, would be writing the
backends. They are the most important parts since they must
understand what's being parsed and convert this data to the
correct output. I think I'll be writing two backends, to
start: DocBook to HTML (HTML has a very similar structure to
DocBook and things should be easy to do) and DocBook to
LaTeX (this backend would solve _lots_ of troubles with been
facing here at Conectiva).
My knowledgement on LaTeX is bigger than my knowledgement
in HTML. I must allocate some time to write that backend. As
I've written on prior entries, my working tool will be
Perl.
Another thing that I've been doing is using Mailman and
Postfix to manage some very small lists (5 subscribers on
our development team). I've found Mailman very easy to use
and it can manage lists that doesn't require any complex
validation of messages. It won't work, as an example, to a
list that I admin with other people that has a script to
check for empty messages, HTML messages, excessive quotes,
etc. As it is a GPL program, we can try to enhance it to
allow running some scripts before accepting the post. The
problem is that I don't know Python. Ok... There are
other guys to do that (Acme, maybe)
or some time to learn...
The best achievement that I had today was seeing all my
messages converted to Gnus
NNML folders and with Gnus fetching and filtering it. It was
cool!!!
Well, that's it. Time to go to write other stuff... Maybe
more poetry, who knows?