Changelog

Carsten suggests that the changelog should be in XML. So, in the spirit of avoiding the work I have to do to pass my degree, I hacked up a little XML changelog, with some XSL to turn it into HTML. The tarball is here. Untar it, and then run either

xsltproc changelog.xsl changelog.xml > changelog.html

for changes by app, or

xsltproc changelog-by-type.xsl changelog.xml > changelog.html

for changes by type.

It's just a proof-of-concept, so there are no doubt plenty of ways to improve it, but it's quite an elegant solution, and in purely technical terms, is probably the Right Way(TM) to do it (ie, XML changelog with XSL to convert it to HTML). However, the amaroK guys (I'm told) have a ruby script that produces HTML from a simpler, ad hoc changelog file format. Though lacking the technical elegance of the XML solution (he says, without having seen said ruby script), it might turn out to be the better option, since a simpler file format might mean more people adding to the file, and therefore a better changelog. Plus, I don't know ruby, so no one can ask me to maintain it :-).

Oh, and since I mentioned XSL, does anyone know of some kind of "templating" system for it, so I could write (say)

if condition {
   ...
   }

instead of the fairly unpleasant

<xsl:if test="condition"> 
   ...
   </xsl:if>

or the far, far worse way of sending parameters (arguments) to templates (functions). The basic ideas of XSL (templates, applying them with apply-templates) are really nice, but why oh why did they have to make it an XML variant? It's just nasty to look at, and seems like a particularly egregious case of "when all you have is a hammer...". OK, rant is over; we now return to your scheduled programming (and lots of comments telling me that I misused "egregious").