[tex-live] [LONG] Improving TeX package classification and the associated documentaion

Oliver Bandel oliver at first.in-berlin.de
Tue Jul 3 21:06:27 CEST 2007


Zitat von Florent Rougon <f.rougon at free.fr>:
[...]
>
> With RFC-2822 on the other hand, the file would look quite
> user-friendly... maybe too. I think users would often update them in
> such ways that they don't have a valid syntax, since such files look too
> much as freeform files.
[...]

If there would be a simple tool that asks for the values
for each key, and the user types in the text, the file could be created
automatically, and no typos could destroy the validity of the
data.
Simple input-masks or text-based question-and-answer
scripts should be written in a short time.
If people were encouraged to use these tools, then this
minimizes the syntax-error-problems drastically.

More experienced users might use the texteditor and therefore
would be the biggest source of problems, when doing typos, but a
syntax-checker tool, or something that writes new entries to the
local catalogue - and always should check the syntax - could help
here also.



> For instance, users could well screw up the
> folding of long lines (which need whitespace at the beginning of every
> continuation line). Furthermore, RFC-2822 syntax is far less convenient
> than XML for describing structured data IMHO.


I have not read the RFC-2822 but the Linux-Software-Map (LSM)
uses a simple format since a long time, and I see no reason
why this should not be possible for TeX-stuff also:

   http://lsm.execpc.com/LSM.README


BTW: there are not only XML-parsers out there, tehere are also tools like lex
and yacc available for most languages, and so, a simple format could be parsed
easily.

Ciao,
   Oliver


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