[Dwai-developers] time to code

[Lucio C. <lu...@su...>]

It has been quite a few days since the last post... maybe you think the 
project is dead, but it isn't. Actually I've thought a lot about the coding 
of the dewmaster script, and I've faced some difficulty: while python might 
be a good choice for it, the problem is that I don't know python, and seems 
to me is not a good idea to use the dewmaster script as my helloworld in 
python. Obviously I tried a real helloworld in python before trying the 
dewmaster script, and there I faced another problem: I don't like python.

That said, if we chose python either we find someone else to code, or we end 
up with a script written by a newbie which, moreover, doesn't like the 
language.

Given that there are only 5 subscribers to this list, and given that it seems 
no one has much time to spend on this project, we have to choose a language 
that the coder already knows and likes. So I decided to try making the 
dewmaster script using bash; this has a few advantages:
- I know it a bit and I like it a lot
- It's a very fast way to write a dewmaster script
- It's a good starting point to understand what we need to do in a more 
complex dewmaster script

Obviously everyone here should feel free to write its own dewmaster script in 
whatever language he wants, all I'm saying is that I'm going to use bash for 
mine.

My idea for the first dewmaster script is to build a very simple script that 
builds the XML file from the user input (readline) and a set of files, each 
one containing a chunk of the final XML. The logic is trivial, e.g.: ask the 
user the package name, take the file with the XML chunk relative to the 
package tag, feed it through sed to substitute some predefined string with 
the package name and append the result to the output file. Repeat until the 
user gives input.

My script won't validate the output file against our XSD for now.

I hope to have a working script for my next post.

Cheers,
Lucio.