There has been quite a bit of discussion about meta data in the PDDP
meetings, I'll try to summarize what we have agreed on:
The plan is to make a standard subpatch for meta data [pd META].
This hides the meta data and makes it easier to parse for it. The
terms don't have to be pre-defined, but we should standardize terms.
Like "CATEGORY", "KEYWORDS", "DESCRIPTION", "AUTHOR", etc.
The name of the object should be taken from the help patch, not from
the meta data. Each object should have its own help patch. For
bigger concepts which are linked together, like "math objects", there
would be an "about" page with the related help patches link to, and
vice-versa.
The meta data format is only parsed from the [pd META] subpatch. The
meta type is the first part of the comment, its all caps, and its
terminated by a colon.
KEYWORDS: addition sum CATEGORY: math
This means that new meta data can be declared by just adding it to
the [pd META] subpatch in the correct format. Nothing else would be
needed, i.e. there is no static list of meta types, but its
dynamically generated from the help patches. Standardization of meta
types is important here, otherwise we have chaos. But with CVS,
that's not too hard to coordinate.
.hc
On Apr 28, 2006, at 11:37 AM, geiger wrote:
Yes,
Its trivial to write the script that extracts the information, the only real challenge is to define tags and change all the help files.
tags could be
Name: (the external name(s)) Description: (what does it do) Author: (the authors name) Type: (external/abstraction)
(more ?)
All tags together with values go in one comment object. Information like last update time is taken from the CVS.
We would need volunteers to fill out the help patches and comunicate with the authors of the externals. If someone of the authors is
against this approach the information can still be embedded in the help
file as a subpatch which is hidden behind a white canvasA :)Unresovled problems are how to make translations etc. I don't know, maybe the pddp team has a solution for that.
Günter
On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
It would be awesome to build PDB from meta data embedded in help patches. Any help would be appreciated.
.hc
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