[HECnet] CSV Proposal

[Sampsa Laine]

On 19 May 2013, at 20:03, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:


On Sun, 19 May 2013, Sampsa Laine wrote:



On 19 May 2013, at 19:58, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:


#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT.   There's no order.


When me and Steve Davidson originally thought of adding parseable info to INFO.TXT we had the idea that the file itself would be free-form text with a machine   parseable block at the end, with delimiters.

If you look at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/hecnetinfo/hecnetinfo.com?q=chimpy you'll see what I mean, there's a clearly defined block of machine readable CSV at the end.


How many people followed that though?


No idea - I don't think anyone ever wrote a parser.

But here's a brief outline of how I think this should work:

1. Someone (=me) defines the CSV format formally in a document
2. This document is passed around and corrected until majority is happy with it
3. Someone (=brian) writes a parser
4. People nominate boxes from where their INFO.TXTs should be pulled (one can cover a whole area or even more)
5. This is integrated into the DB using the parser from 3 periodically.