<description> format?

[Joost van Baal]

Hi Wytze (and others),

Thanks for joining this discussion about the description blurbs in 
the logreport reports.  (For those who missed the start of this thread:
discussion is about reimplementing descriptions like the one in the
email report:

  <subreport superservice="email" date="Sun May 6 11:40:17 CEST 2001">
    <title>failed deliveries per torelay, tops</title>
    <description>(note: printed is first word in stat= field. therefore,
      'service unavailable'   gives 'service'
      'user unknown'          gives 'user'
      'host unknown'          gives 'host'
      'data format error'     gives 'data'
      'remote protocol error' gives 'remote')
      'Can't create output'   gives 'can't')</description>
    <table>
<snip>
    </table>
  </subreport>

which, typeset in ascii looks like

 failed deliveries per torelay, tops

  (note: printed is first word in stat= field. therefore,   
      'service unavailable'   gives 'service'
      'user unknown'          gives 'user'
      'host unknown'          gives 'host'
      'data format error'     gives 'data'
      'remote protocol error' gives 'remote')
      'Can't create output'   gives 'can't')

)

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 09:38:35AM +0200, Wytze van der Raay wrote:
> Hallo Egon,
> 
> (Egon Willighagen wrote:)
> > op dit moment ondersteund het XML rapport een tag <description>, maar het
> > geval wil dat de inhoud nu platte tekst is. Ten behoeve van layout zou ik
> > graag hieraan layout elementen toevoegen. Nou is alleen de vraag welke dit
> > mogen zijn...
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > Basically, the issue is this: how much, and how do we add explainatory
> > information to reports? Do we explain what "404" etc is for the reports that
> > use it? Where do we give the explenation? Do we link from within the report
> > to a appendix in the report? Or do we give it with the report itself (current
> > state)?
> 
> The casual user is served best with in-line explanations I think.
> Note that the casual user may include the manager of an experienced
> sysadmin who needs to show the system behaviour to his boss.
> The regular user probably doesn't care about explanations, and is
> best served with a reference at most; anything more may become
> irritating after a couple of weeks.
> So my question is: can you come up with a scheme which supports both
> options? (e.g. under the control of a global/local configuration variable)
> 

This idea is interesting, and usefull.  However, I believe we first
should tackle the issue of markup in the description blurbs.  Currently,
we've got

 <!ELEMENT description           (dbx:para)>

in service/all/lib/xml/dtd/logreport.dtd .  So, there's no markup
in the description fields now.

I believe a nice implementation of enabling markup would be like this:
We could change the report_* scripts to produce something like e.g.:

<subreport superservice="email" date="Sun May 6 11:40:17 CEST 2001">
<title>failed deliveries per torelay, tops</title>
<description txtfile=/home/hibou/logreport/texts/report_error-description.txt>
   <emphasis>bla bla</emphasis> en nog wat text </description>

On systems lacking xml tools, the lr_xml2ascii script reads
/home/hibou/logreport/texts/report_error-description.txt, and uses
this as a typeset description blurb.  This way, the poor man's xml
parser, which lr_xml2ascii is, doesn't need to be an almost fullblown
docbook engine.

BTW, we're planning to publish a new release before wednesday 16th.
I don't think these plans will be implemented by that time...

> 
> PS: should this discussion perhaps move to the development mailing list?

Absolutely.  Done :)

Bye,

Joost

-- 
Joost van Baal              . .           http://www.logreport.org/
                           .   .
/^LogReport$/               . .               joostvb at logreport.org

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