Some people think that the biggest problem with XML is that it's being used too much, in too many places where it doesn't make sense to use it. In fact, I am often such a voice.
But I also think the reverse is becoming true all too often. I find myself resisting the temptation to design documents as XML for fear that I'll be accused of {over,ab}using XML. One such area is the ChangeLog file I have in each of my software projects. I'd really like my little cpan-announcer tool that posts to this journal to be able to include the relevant entries in the ChangeLog. But not all of my ChangeLogs have consistent format to them, so having the tool strip the data out would be an exercise in redundancy. Then again, I don't want to re-invent the wheel. So I turned to Google.
But the best I could get was this view into the VisualDCT project. Nothing against the work done, but I'd feel better if that DTD had shown up a few other places.
Pointers are gladly welcomed.
--rjray
Re:RevML
barries on 2002-05-08T13:25:08
RevML is a grammar for describing a series of revisions to to a set of files, it's equivalent to a collection of RCS files, but with more metadata and with MD5 checksums. I use it extensively in the test suite for VCP (Version CoPy, which copies file hierarchies between source repositories like CVS, Perforce, and soon VSS). I'd like to find other uses for RevML; it can be used to capture a repository or a series of changesets and transfer them to other repositories.
There's a DTD for RevML (you may need to View Source to see it; that browser is shipping it off as HTML, I think), and the test suite for VCP generates several
.revml files in the t/ directory. RevML is not a changelog grammar. It could be used or adapted for that--it's got user, datestamp and comment fields, and can associate labels and filenames with changes, etc--but that's not its primary goal.
Feel free to mail me if you have any questions or ideas about it.
- Barrie
