Actually the Makefile *already* uses perl for some dirty mungeing at a couple of places, I think, so one more or less won't make a lot of difference. After several days banging my head on this particular brick wall, I have come round to the view that we're all doomed anyway. The perl hack has to be more sophisticated than at first thought supposed; I can't figure out how to include it in the general post-processing pipeline (as opposed to simple mungeing the Exemplars). And none of the cunning ways I've tried to add the necessary intelligence to the pure ODD input or its processing has so far worked. In Ringo's immortal words, I've got blisters on my fingers. At least I've managed to check the purified ODDs into the P5-Pure branch though, so someone else can take a look... On 30/08/15 18:02, Syd Bauman wrote:
Well, I'm not pushing hard for Perl per se, but my point is that as requirements go, it's not a problem. Pretty much any system that has `make` has `perl`, too. Same can't be said for Saxon or Ant. (Yes, I realize that our processing chain already requires these things, and that it would not be a good idea to try to get rid of them.)
My objection, BTW, is *not* with using XSLT instead of Perl. My objection, a minor one at that, is with performing the hack on the input PureODD rather than on the output DTD. But that objection is not a show-stopper, it's just a misgiving.
I'm not impugning PERL per se, although I don't love it myself; I'm just suggesting that we keep the number of requirements in the toolchain to a minimum. We _must_ have Java and Saxon and Ant; we don't have to have PERL just to do a string-replace. I really would like to get away from any dependence on CLI stuff in favour of Ant, so that we really could have a platform-neutral build process.