June 2008 Archives

Roland Giersig had a presentation at YAPC 2007 called 'Techniques for Remote System-Monitoring'. He was explaining his search after a good logging format or how to store continuous flow of data in a most usable form.XML? YAML? CSV? XML is nice but for a machines not for humans, YAML is nice for both but it's hard to grep. CSV is readable and grep-able but not too flexible. So what is the conclusion? ECSV is like a CSV but in each comma separated field the name of the column is set. This gives a flexibility to skip, reorder, add the fields. All the information is stored per line so it's easy to grep. Also it's easy to compare two records by md5-ing the lines or doing string eq.

For my next project I'm going to play with this idea so I've create new module - Text::ECSV. Basically all it does is that in addition to the Text::CSV functionality it also gets the key/values from the CSV fields and store them in a hash for easy accessing.

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As I was not able to reach author of Pod::DocBook v1.2 (UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE) Nandu Shah, I ressurected it from CPAN and created Pod::2::DocBook. This version futures many handy options that can be used to produce parts of docbook document, like sections, articles etc.

I use it in my Makefile this way:

pod/example.xml: $(PODROOT)/Path/To/Module.pm
        pod2docbook --title='example module POD' --no-header --doctype=section $ $@

and then I xinclude it to the docbook document.

Hopefully others will also take advantage of this module.

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