On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 14:39 -0500, David Robillard wrote:
New idea: it is tempting to define a very simple
turtle document format
for hosts to signify what they support, then this kind of compatibility
information could be automatically generated as well (and in a much more
useful form than a human could put together). The information is
already there for plugins. As far as I'm concerned the lack of
automatically generated documentation (and/or machine readable data in
general) is pretty much the sole reason for every single complaint
related to this whole thing. This way is also decentralized, but the
results for all "known" implementations could be hosted at lv2plug.in
(or anywhere else) for convenience.
I am surprised I didn't think of this before, but it seems to be a
pretty good idea. All that is needed as far as maintenance goes is for
hosts to supply a simple turtle document that says "I implement foo and
bar and baz extensions". The rest can be compiled into whatever fancy
human readable form you want, for every single plugin out there, by a
tool. If I provide a template, would anyone be willing to put together
these documents? I will gladly write the tool if the data is there, and
the problem will be solved, and a convention set that solves it in the
future with basically no effort involved.
As a start, I'll have a try with collecting a list of hosts and plugins
and what features(/extensions) they provide or require right here on the
list ;)
Longterm it might be useful to have a way to query for this locally. For
an application that builds a matrix for the hosts and plugins you have
installed. Now, it's clear where to look for plugins, but some
convention/mechanism would be needed to fin the host RDF files, right?
--
Thorsten Wilms
thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/