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On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 01:27:43PM +0100, Nicolas Girard wrote:
> Let me tell you about a dream that will come true when i can do the same
> stuff than what i'm about to do with docbook files:
> 
> - for a docbook document d.xml:
>   - ask the CVS server if the document has changed since the last check
>   - if it has changed:
>     - get the two revisions as d.old and d.new
>     - call xmldiff -x d.old d.new > diff.xupdate:
>         ( -x, --xupdate
>             display output in Xupdate xml specification )
>     - transform the diff.xupdate
>       into revisions in docbook format,
>            with some additional informations 
>          (date, log entry) given by CVS,
>       using an xslt stylesheet,
>       and add it to, let's say, revisions.xml

If you are willing to do some Scheme hacking, the answer is NOW.

It is already possible to export/import TM documents to a trivial XML
format. You can find more about this on http://ddaa.net/texmacs and by
searching the archives of address@hidden. There is also ongoing
work to make the conversion less trivial by converting the internal
encoding of TeXmacs to Unicode (see recent posts on texmacs-dev).

The main remaining issue is integrating CVS in TeXmacs, but that is
not a complex issue. By the way, if you hack something for this, we
are very interested because it will simplify the use of the
texmacs-doc CVS.


> *That's it*
> As d.xml already includes revisions.xml, there's a clean separation between
> the changes and the associated metadata describing these changes.
> Of course, you can imagine as many refinements as you can ; for
> instance, you could imagine that all section or all chapter have their
> own revisions
> 
> All that is possible thanks to the simple fact that docbook is xml,
> since xml defines:
> - a standard way of associating metadata to data
> - a standard way of parsing data and metadata

These issues are best discussed on texmacs-dev.


> So all this could be possible if TeXmacs used xml as its file format...
> No, it's not that i'm trying to convince you to switch to xml....err,
> hem, yes, actually, i'm trying to convince you... sorry !!

TeXmacs internals will not switch to XML, because S-exps are more
generic and easier to work with. And anyway we are working towards
better XML export/import filters just right now.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.