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:cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of Jeffrey F. Painter
> Sent: 10 March 2014 20:04
> To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
> 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
>> <richard.hattersley at metoffice.gov.uk> 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: richard.hattersley at metoffice.gov.uk Web: www.metoffice.gov.uk
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> CF-metadata mailing list
>>> CF-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
>>> http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
>>>
>>
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Received on Tue Mar 11 2014 - 10:44:42 GMT
