cvs-src summary news and improvements
Mark Johnston
mjohnston at skyweb.ca
Wed Dec 29 21:40:23 PST 2004
Hi folks,
Those of you who watch out for the cvs-src summaries would have noticed there
wasn't one last week - sorry about that. I'll be posting last week's and
this week's, bundled together, right after this post.
The main news about the summaries is that I no longer write them in
reStructuredText, in favor of a small XML dialect. This gives the following
new features:
- Text summaries are no longer speckled with funny punctuation.
- HTML and text summaries now have links to man pages and files in CVS.
- As often requested, the summaries are now available in RSS.
- If you want to do anything with the summary data, you can use the XML (but
see below.)
The "feedback requested" is mostly on the RSS, since I don't use RSS myself
and know very little about it. All I've done is validate the feed. If you
want to see the data in other RSS flavors, or Atom or whatever, drop me an
e-mail with a link to a reasonable spec on the format, and I can likely
accomodate you. Also, it currently just serves up the latest summary, with a
hard cutover when a new one is posted; I don't know whether this pleases RSS
browsers (aggregators?) or not.
If you want to deal with the XML directly, please let me know. I'm still
getting the XML format itself sorted out, so I'd like to hear interested
parties' thoughts on it and know who I have to warn if I play with the
format. I can also send you a copy of the Python scripts I process the XML
with, although the code is intensely ugly. Also, don't base your concept of
the XML version on the text summary, since some of the data is thrown away;
you can get the XML source at the Web page (http://excel.xl0.org/FreeBSD).
All that said, consider using the RSS if you don't need the XML metadata,
since the RSS format is much less likely to fluctuate.
If you have any comments or suggestions on the changes, or on changes you'd
like to see, now is the perfect time to tell me. Otherwise, thanks for
reading the summaries.
Mark
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