I knew the Perl market wasn't good, but...!

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:37:51 GMT

comments

Shavian transliterator, part two: Do it in Perl

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:38:03 GMT

Today it occurred to me that there is also a fifth option to my pondering of the other day: keep it on the command line, and write it in Perl. I already have a Shavian transliterator in CPAN which could do with an overhaul. Most of the file formats it would need to read also have code to read them (although .po support is kind of iffy). And command-line tools built in Perl can be easily distributed over CPAN, as ack has shown.

The problem of updating the wiki is then easily fixed because we can use CPAN's support for the MediaWiki API, and upload a list of the missing words to a user's userspace on the wiki.

One thing I'd like to get right in my head before I start is where the database would go. Currently, the CPAN Shavian transliterator keeps it with other Perl data in /usr. But it would be really useful to be able to check for updates from shavian.org.uk and download them, without constant updates of the CPAN package. So maybe the data should go in ~/.cache/shavian ?

Someone is apparently already using the name "Sparkle" for a free software project, so maybe I'll rename this to "makeshaw" or something.

comments

Monument

I knew the Perl market wasn't good, but...!

Shavian transliterator, part two: Do it in Perl