Re: macro archive re-launch

[Guido Draheim]

Es schrieb Dan Kegel:
> 
> Guido Draheim wrote:
> >
> > overkill.
> 
> Agreed.  I'm tempted to say:
>   Death to XML, long live *plain* text!
> 
it's not quite xml that's bugging me - it's that the
intelligence needed to form a good html view is put
on the creator of the macro. Simon(s) says, that the
current extraction of information out of the dnl-header
is not very good in order to get a good html view - 
this is true. But my answer would be to add more
intelligence into the extractor with more options that
writers of dnl-headers can use to optimize the output,
possibly with optional xml-tags thrown in some of the
time - as part of the dnl-commentblock, not around it.

Since gnu ac-archive drifts into xml buzzword space, I
will probably take the opportunity to throw away Simons' 
macro2html.cpp that is currently used, and build a perl
script for the sf-net ac-archive that will have atleast 
the extracting and report generation intelligence of the 
c++ binary - I have to admit that I find it easier to 
add extra intelligence into a script made in a Practical 
Extraction and Report Language rather than in C++, but 
that has to wait a bit since I am busy with other stuff.

Anyway, let's see what the Simons' efforts will finally
bring about - I must say to be quite interested to see
what the experiences with such a setup will be, since
I am doing quite some xml stuff as part of my daily life,
but in there I value it more as the intermediate computer-
written almost-human-readable data-representation instead 
of a user-written input and user-oriented output format.

Anyway, perhaps such a perl-based script that converts
macro-dnl-commentblock to xml/html-doc-pages, could be
also used for plain autoconf, but that's a second step
I guess, as there is much more complexity in that.

cheers, guido