Weekly report: week 24

Apparently I’m not that good at working on weekends, other stuff just kept interrupting me all the time… But here’s what I did last week:

• Kept reading the Moin source code and discussing with the community. I had a meeting with my mentor, you can read about it in a prior blog post. We made some important decisions and I also updated my wiki pages accordingly.
• stickster told me about doclifter, that’s a python program for doing man page -> DocBook XML conversion. I did some tests, it seemed to be working very well, so that’s what I’m going to use, at least for the publication phase.
• I had to spend one day with fighting PyDev for Eclipse. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty nice otherwise, but I just couldn’t get code completion to work fully. It kind of works now, but not as well as I’d like it to. But it’s usable enough… Here’s a forum thread discussing my problem.
• Michael Kerrisk (TLDP man pages maintainer) also answered my mail, we’re probably going to discuss my project later this week.
• Thomas Waldmann recommended me to use Wiki XML-RPC to import the pages into the wiki. This way most of the processing can be done on another host and it’s hopefully lighter for the wiki server.
• So I spent about a day and a half getting to know the XML-RPC stuff and actually coding a basic implementation of page importing. The man pages still need to be converted manually and then the produced XML file can be added as a Moin page.
• Thomas Waldmann also told me about a new multilang feature in Moin, I should test and look into that, I could probably use it for either multilang or multirelease or both

This is my plan for week 25: Try to get the man page importer somewhat finished, so that it uses doclifter automatically, hopefully with multilang/multirelease support and a nice namespace hierarchy. Contact the Fedora Infrastructure team to get a test server from Fedora. If there’s time left, try to plan and start implementing the info page importer.

I won’t be working much today or Tuesday, as I told in my previous post, I’m going to go see Evanescence this evening. It’s Midsummer next weekend, but I’ll still try to get some work done during that time, so that I can “catch up” a bit.