Re: approval from sun and a last XML request [was Re: [gnome-love] wanted: php or cgi programmer with some spare time to help with gnome test spec]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2001-12-03 at 19:49, fflewddur wrote:
> latest vesion is up and is fully dynamic.  it supports adding new
> modules in the form of directories full of html test files, or simply
> adding in a new test file to an existing module.  the only rule here is
> that all test files must end in '.html'.  if this looks good, i'll go
> through and remove all the obsolete code/files, then post a tarball with
> the sources.

Looks great here, though obviously I can't test the drop in stuff from
here :)

> > > well, i tracked down three perl scripts that are *supposed* to generate
> > > the instructions, and while they do run during the make_all_indices
> > > script, they didn't actually change anything :P
> > 
> > Which ones are those? I'll take a peek.
> > 
> the three 'make_toc_xxxx.pl' files all came up when i grep'd for some of
> the html lines, and the code in them is exactly the same as the html the
> instruction pages spit out.  however, when i edit them and rebuild the
> sources, the instruction pages don't change at all.  i hope you have
> better luck with this than i did :)

Ah. I'll look at those more closely, but I'd assumed offhand they built
the TOCs and not the actual [test_name].html files. I'll take a look.

> > > i'm not very familiar with xml yet, but i've been meaning to learn. 
> > > what exactly would be needed in order to move this whole thing over to
> > > xml files?
> > 
> > 1) An XML format; wouldn't need to be more complicated (at first) than
> > <test>
> > <component></component>     }- these two might be optional- i.e., if
> > null/not present, then just build them from the dir structure?
> > <subcomponent></component>  }
> > <testcasename></testcasename>
> > <testaim></testaim>
> > <procedure></procedure>
> > </test>
> > but this is just a suggestion; I'm sure some XML gurus on the list will
> > have a better idea.
> > 
> > 2) a perl script to convert the current HTML into that format
> > 
> > 3) some php magic to read the XML and convert it into something
> > prettified for the web. Since this new HTML would be dynamically
> > generated, I figure it would be easy to edit/make prettier/prune useless
> > info/etc. Also, since the data is in a nice, parseable format, I'd hope
> > it would be trivial to add the <testaim> field to the test page, and
> > thus dispense with the table of contents page altogether (maybe.) 
> > 
> it seems manuel will be able to look at this on wednsday, but if he
> needs any help, i could at least get the php part taken care of for him.

Cool. What your about to tar up will be a huge start for this, though.
Hopefully I can talk with Shane at sun and we can get this into GNOME
cvs RSN. 

> btw, congrats to you and all your co-workers on evolution 1.0.  i just
> got it to compile here on slack 8.0, and its absolutely fantastic. 
> great job! :)

Thanks. It wouldn't have happened without without contributions from the
community- without the folks who wrote bugzilla and filed >10,000 bugs
it would have had a lot of features that all crashed as soon as you used
them :) Hopefully this work will be a start towards better testing of
all of GNOME, not just evo.
Luis