Re: Format of S-expression metadata for SRFI documents Lassi Kortela 27 Mar 2019 21:42 UTC

> I have been following your discussion and have seen you mention Snow
> here and there. It happens that I maintain a package manager called Akku
> (or Akku.scm for easier web searches) where I just now added all
> snow-fort.org packages:
>
>    https://akkuscm.org/
>    https://akkuscm.org/packages/
>
> The archive software generates a file with metadata from all packages:
>
>    https://archive.akkuscm.org/archive/metadata.scm.xz

Hello and thank you for participating :) Akku looks like some seriously
impressive work! You are even auto-converting R7RS->R6RS libraries for
Chez which is awesome. I'll make use of this right away. Chez is gaining
a lot of traction now that it's open source.

That metadata looks great too. You have all the dependencies, and the
names of all the exported symbols for a lot of libraries. That's a very
good start.

I created a GitHub organization <https://github.com/schemedoc> and
invited you along with other people in case you want to contribute
and/or follow the progress of this metadata aggregation.

> The chez-srfi package provides most SRFIs, so you can perhaps compare
> the data with your own parsers.

That's a very good idea. It doesn't sound too hard to do a
cross-validator so I think we should definitely do it. It'll be exciting
to explore Chez anyway so why not :)

> The file format is very close to how Akku works
> internally, so my apologies if the format has oddities.

No problem, S-expressions are easy enough to traverse anyway :)

It would be great if we had somebody who's really good at designing APIs
and organizing information. I for one have no particular talent in those
areas... Designing stable interfaces and data models for the long term
(decade+) is a very different skill set than most programming requires.