[Neurodebian-devel] How can Blends techniques be adapted to NeuroDebian

[Michael Hanke]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:03:55PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 02:07:41PM +0200, Michael Hanke wrote:

[snip all the bits that we agree on anyway]

> > Long blurb -- short summary: We would like to keep contributing our bits
> > to the existing projects/tasks in Debian unless there is a good reason
> > not to do so. We would like to be able to get all information back out
> > through a stable interface that allows us to generate our website with
> > minimal effort. Whatever gets us there is fine with me.
> 
> To make my point clear:  I would rather prefer to create NeuroDebian-ish
> web pages not only for NeuroDebian but for any Blend - I can really not
> assume that the NeuroDebian user audience is the only one who deserves
> good user oriented pages.

Fair enough. Let see how we can proceed. I guess we would all be happy
if NeuroDebian starts using as much blends framework (code) as possible.
I was thinking at which level of information exchange/aggregation is
most useful, while avoid duplication with services like UDD/DDE.

I believe that we would benefit most at the level where all the
package-information that is present on the blends pages is processed to
a degree where it is ready for insertion into a (language-agnostic) page
template. In the blends pages case the is HTML, in our case this is RST.
If we can establish this layer as an interface, we could write/change
our code to create a portal like neuro.debian.net from this information.
NeuroDebian could then switch to blend data as its primary source of
information and discontinue any non-neuroscience specific data
aggregation. If we find additional information is needed/useful we could
directly integrate additional data grabber/aggregators into the blends
framework. And of course, if the blends code breaks, more people should
be motivated to fix it ;-)

While this doesn't immediately give us the all-in-wonder web portal for
any blends, it would help focus efforts on the important bits. If we can
generate neuro.debian.net by simply pointing a script to a specific
blend (which would be the upcoming neuro-* blend), we should be able to
do it for any other one with relatively low effort.

In terms of how to make this data accessible: Right now we are using
JSON, but pretty much anything like that should do it.

What do you think?


Thanks,

Michael


-- 
Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de