Richard,
We (meaning LLNL people) don't really have positive plans to stay in
DocBook format. It is simply less effort to use it than to identify
and convert to an alternative, if one exists. We recently bought a copy
of the XMLmind XML Editor, which makes in reasonably tractable to edit
in DocBook.
I suspect that most markup languages won't do all features used in the
CF Conventions document. We may be able to work around that, but I'm
not sure of it. A few months ago I looked into converting to a word
processor format, but it looked like a much bigger job than I could
afford the time for.
I would be delighted if you could do this better! You definitely have
the right idea for where we should be. And I hope that having this
discussion on the cf-metadata list will bring out some more good ideas.
For the next few weeks, I don't think we at LLNL will do more than make
the documents, and the Trac system, reliably available on the web again,
and put the document sources on github.
- Jeff
On 3/11/14 3:22 AM, Hattersley, Richard wrote:
Hi Jeff,
That's excellent news. And thanks for the update - it'll save me duplicating
your efforts.
It looks like your current plans are for the source code to stay in DocBook format. Do
you also have any plans to allow "instant" visual feedback? For example, to
convert it to another format which can be rendered by GitHub
(https://github.com/github/markup#markups) or reathedocs.org?
Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: CF-metadata [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Jeffrey F. Painter
Sent: 10 March 2014 20:04
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Editing/publishing workflow
Several of us at LLNL agree that a github-based system is the way to go for the
CF Conventions. And the previous messages on this thread turn out to be very
timely!
For background, over the last few months our Plone-based web site has
become unmaintainable as we lost infrastructure support. Just a few
days ago I gave up on fixing the system. Matthew Harris has been working on a
new web site, located mostly at github. It should be up within a week.
The CF Conventions "source code" has for many years been in in DocBook,
an xml dialect. It is presently kept in a Subversion repository. We
will very likely make this available on github.
After the documents, the most important component of the CF Conventions web
site is the Trac issue-tracking system. Last week I migrated it to a more
recent version on a new machine. Over the next week I plan to migrate it to
the latest production version. This will continue to be hosted at LLNL, but a
link to it will be on the github site.
I hope these changes will serve the CF community at least for the short run, so
we can think seriously about what systems to use in the long run.
- Jeff Painter
On 3/10/14 7:20 AM, Signell, Richard wrote:
Richard,
I think moving to github would be a huge improvement. The git model
and the tools that github provides would make it much easier for other
folks to propose changes, and for those changes to be reviewed,
discussed and merged. I think Brian and a few others were also in
favor when we discussed this last fall, but we lacked someone to carry
the flag.
-Rich
On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 7:35 AM, Hattersley, Richard
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I've recently been dipping into the UGRID conventions
(https://github.com/ugrid-conventions/ugrid-conventions) and was
struck by how pleasant the editing/publishing workflow was. Clearly
from a content complexity point of view the UGRID conventions are
smaller and simpler than CF so a direct comparison is not possible,
but to help illustrate some of the possibilities I've prepared a
cut-down demo version of the CF conventions document using GitHub and "Read the
Docs".
The published versions of the demo are available from:
http://cf-conventions.readthedocs.org. I've set the default version
to 1.6, but by using the options in the bottom-left corner of the
page it is possible to view 1.7-draft.1 instead. There is also a PDF
option, but that currently has a few quirks which I've not attempted
to address. NB. By ticking a box in GitHub, these published versions
are automatically updated whenever the underlying content changes.
The underlying "source code" is defined using reStructuredText (reST)
markup for processing by the Spinx document generator. It is hosted on GitHub
at:
https://github.com/cf-metadata/cf-conventions. I created the reST
markup using an off-the-shelf HTML-to-reST converter but it did
require some subsequent manual tweaks.
I've also created a simple "pull request" to illustrate what happens
when someone proposes a change:
https://github.com/cf-metadata/cf-conventions/pull/1. NB. By default
GitHub shows the changes in the source code, but it can also show a
rendered version of the changes, much like the strikeout/highlight
style used in the current workflow:
https://github.com/cf-metadata/cf-conventions/pull/show/1/files/e7c84
59#diff-e7c84590262562a10e9fb4cf714098d3
Is there interest in taking this further?
Richard Hattersley
Benevolent Dictator of Iris - a CF library for Python:
www.scitools.org.uk/iris
Met Office FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1392 885702
Email: [email protected] Web: www.metoffice.gov.uk
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