GNU OrgaDoc 1.0 Released For Managing Documents Between Computers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU OrgaDoc 1.0 Released For Managing Documents Between Computers

GNU OrgaDoc is a means of copying and maintaining a pool of documents between a set of computers. Document synchronization is handled by rsync or unison and is done without needing a database server or other components...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-OrgaDoc-1.0-Released

[coder543]

It looks like the rewrite started in 2017... starting a new project in C89 in 2017!? That's... unexpected to me. You trade 28 years of PL research and industry experience to gain... what? Slightly more platform portability? I don't want to knock the accomplishment. Performing a rewrite successfully is impressive even under the most optimal of conditions. But, Rust, Go, C++17... even C11, if nothing else.

[tildearrow]

The OrgaDoc 1.0 milestone marks the rewrite from the Eiffel language to C89.

Careful...

[plasmasnake]

Does anybody understand what this actually does? If it uses rsync for synchronizing files, what else is left for it to do? I'm confused about the "readme" examples on the website: https://www.gnu.org/software/orgadoc/

Looking at the documentation, all I see is some stuff about generating XML files (and some other formats) that represent the documents in the directory hierarchy: https://www.gnu.org/software/orgadoc...#How-to-use-it

Not sure if I'm missing something here.

[wizard69]

It looks like the rewrite started in 2017... starting a new project in C89 in 2017!? That's... unexpected to me. You trade 28 years of PL research and industry experience to gain... what? Slightly more platform portability? I don't want to knock the accomplishment. Performing a rewrite successfully is impressive even under the most optimal of conditions. But, Rust, Go, C++17... even C11, if nothing else.

This is almost my exact thinking. Even C11 is 6 years old by that time and very well supported on a number of compilers.

This is almost sounds like something I could use if it was adopted by IDE or CAD developers for their documentation. Sadly many developers seem to think that online documentation is the way to go. It isn’t for a number of reasons and some of those online sights are difficult to mirror locally. So yeah a way to keep localdocuments in sync with the web masters would be welcomed.

[Delgarde]

Looking at the documentation, all I see is some stuff about generating XML files (and some other formats) that represent the documents in the directory hierarchy: https://www.gnu.org/software/orgadoc...#How-to-use-it

Not sure if I'm missing something here.

It's hard to tell... somewhat ironically for a documentation tool, the documentation is almost completely non-existent. But my best guess is that the bit about synchonising files is mostly a red-herring... it seems to be a tool for converting documents between a small number of formats, and and the "synchonising" bit seems to amount to "hey, we have files... you can sync them".

[Vistaus]

What was bad about the Eiffel language? I'm not familiar with it (in fact, this is the first time I've even heard about it!).

[Hugh]

What was bad about the Eiffel language? I'm not familiar with it (in fact, this is the first time I've even heard about it!).

I never used it, but I admired it. It was meant to implement "programming by contract". An object-oriented language that was much cleaner and simpler than C++ (how could it not be!). I don't think it really took off so perhaps the tooling hasn't been maintained well. It was commercial but I seem to remember that it was open-sourced. (I'm too lazy to read wikipedia.)

A reasonable replacement now might be Rust. C89 is crazy. Except, perhaps, they started with C generated by the Eiffel compiler (that is likely to be horribly obfuscated).