3.5.3 Changelog in XML

[Frans Englich]

On Sunday 23 April 2006 17:10, Philip Rodrigues wrote:
> Carsten Niehaus wrote:
> > Moin
> >
> > On IRC, Philip Rodrigues, me and others talked about the ChangeLog for
> > the .z releases we do [1]. Phil came up with some XML-magic which
> > automagically creates nice HTML from the attached xml. This makes
> > maintaining a CL easier, because for example there is no need to type the
> > bugs.kde.org-link.
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> Just to add a little more information: I've done this as something of a
> proof-of-concept, so the details aren't finalised.  At the moment, I have
> two XSL stylesheets to transform the XML to HTML in slightly different ways
> (group by module/product and group by change type).

Of course, there's many possible ways to that. One could let the XHTML output 
carry both the representations such that the user can select; implemented 
with perhaps CSS or ECMAScript.

It must of course neither have to be splitted into two files; one could make 
it switchable with xsl:param and xsltproc's stringparam switch.

> I've attached them 
> both, in case anyone's interested in trying them out [1].

Nice code. Many C++/procedural programming die-hards tend to not harness the 
power of templates, but write tons of xsl:if/xsl:for-each/xsl:choose, but 
that's clearly not the case ;-)

A simplification:
      Fixes bug <a>

      <xsl:attribute 
name="href">http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=<xsl:value-of

      select='@bugno'/></xsl:attribute>

      <xsl:value-of select="@bugno"/>

    </a>

Could be replaced by:

Fixes bug <a href="http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id={@bugno}"
	<xsl:value-of select="@bugno"/></a>


Whitespace handling in the stylesheet in XSL-T 1.0 is sometimes a bit 
unpractical, so using concat() can also be a good alternative. A second 
version of what's above:

      Fixes bug <a>

      <xsl:attribute name="href" 
select="concat('http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=', @bugno)"/>

      <xsl:value-of select="@bugno"/></a>

I prefer the first I proposed, since it's the most compact.

> Carsten tells me that some people have been adding to the current HTML
> changelog, so the most important consideration is whether those people
> would still be happy to edit the XML version (there will be a description
> of the format and how to edit/check the file if we decide to go ahead).   I
> think the XML-based method is nice and elegant, but if no-one adds their
> changes, then that elegance isn't worth very much, and we should probably
> stick with the current HTML method.
>
> So, is there anyone who has been adding their changes to the HTML
> changelog, but would *not* be happy to add their changes to the XML
> version?

One can always allow people to write XHTML in the descriptions instead of 
plain strings. With XML Schema, that means it would be validated, if of 
interest.


Cheers,

		Frans