[csw-maintainers] Catalog generation date information in catalog/pkgutil?

[James Lee]

On 15/04/11, 15:11:45, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> wrote regarding Re: 
[csw-maintainers] Catalog generation date information in catalog/pkgutil?:

> It is not a generic structuring standard.

Correct.  It's a pre-existing, enduring example of using comments
to add data to a file.


> (and for that matter, the catalog isnt a "document" either).

Either?  A PostScript program isn't a "document", in fact one of the
reasons DSC exists is to make PostScript easily parsable without full
interpretation, eg, to know how many pages.  Legal PS, non-compliant
DSC:

%!
/Times-Roman 20 selectfont
1 1 10
{
	50 50 moveto
	(Page ) show
	(  ) cvs show
	showpage
} for




> Not that I'm saying we have to find something applicable for
> "catalogs". I'm just saying that it isnt a particularly compelling
> standard.

It's an extremely compelling standard for use with PostScript, mainly
because it *is* the standard.


> I'm hoping there's something more generic out there.

I said create one.  Before we got side tracked in to why a list of
packages is not a page description language we were considering why
simply tagging the date with a defended label would help its
extraction.  A similar problem solved by Adobe over 20 years ago (no
doubt there are others older).  I didn't say use Adobe's DSC or any
one else's (long ago I supported an XML catalog option, then one can
use an exiting parser).



James.