Re: [tei-council] gnuify-changelog.pl problem in Roma source may apply to P5

On 15-08-30 11:15 AM, Peter Stadler wrote:

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Am 30.08.2015 um 19:23 schrieb Martin Holmes :

I think the ant/XSLT solution is better in the long term, and removes one more PERL dependency, but I suspect I'm in a minority there. I don’t think you are! Although ANT is far from being perfect (and already old-fashioned compared to grunt et al.)

The more I use ant, the more I like it, but I'm open to learning about better alternatives. I don't know grunt very well, but I always assumed it was intended mainly for JS rather than Java, and it depends on Node.js, which is another dependency. I think we'd start the conversation by listing out what we must have; and for me that's Java and Saxon. Using Saxon for large-scale transforms in an efficient manner then requires (as far as I can see) a Java-based build tool, and I think ant is the best candidate for that. After that we try to add only what's absolutely necessary, preferably stuff that doesn't require installation. The biggest problem is LaTeX, I suspect. If we could move to XSL:FO/FOP for PDF generation, a lot of requirements would go away.

it’d help in getting OS independent for our build process(es). In the long term we should also strive for documenting the build process within the build scripts more thoroughly.

Agreed. We could be much more verbose and less cryptic in the output messages, as well as the comments in the build files. I do like to see "Oh dear me. ERROR found" in the Makefile, but it's not as helpful as it could be.

I don’t know if ANT can help here (better than Make), though. But maybe this is an issue on its own to be debated on?

I think so. Cheers, Martin

Best Peter