Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 29 Dec 2004 23:40:09 -0600
From:      Mark Johnston <mjohnston@skyweb.ca>
To:        current@freebsd.org, freebsd-cvs-summary@lists.enderunix.org
Subject:   cvs-src summary news and improvements
Message-ID:  <200412292340.09775.mjohnston@skyweb.ca>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200412292340.09775.mjohnston>