Re: [GNUnet-developers] Encrypted Message

[Nils Gillmann]

I'm responding to the list since I see no reason why this
should be offlist. I hope this is okay for you.

Christian Grothoff transcribed 4.4K bytes:

> >> I will probably finish this today or tomorrow, if it builds then, we need
> >> a couple more eyes to review the content, types, URLs and so forth.
> > 
> > Change of course: I took a 2nd closer look at anonbib and for now it
> > is inappropriate for the work which would have to put into it for our
> > bibtex lib. Reasons include: python2 specific issues which take too
> > long to fix.
> 
> That's a very, very brief reason to give for a major change in
> direction. I don't understand at all what "python2 specific issues"
> would even be that we'd care about here. Please do elaborate _a lot_.
> 
> > I have started with bibtex2html, perl based. This should give us a
> > html output in short time. I'll work on this and tell you once it is
> > usable and when you can contribute to the work on it.
> 
> Eh, this makes no sense. To start with, Perl is not really a nice
> language (especially for this). We don't have anything in Perl so far!
> Also, it _does_ make sense to work with the Tor people on this one, so
> if there are issues both projects could benefit.
> 
> So without further information, I'd be against this.
> 

Okay, I've slept over my last emails.

To be fair, your argument that we don't have anything in perl and that
perl is not really a nice language is really just your opinion.
Except for styling we won't change much in the code.[1]
Anyway, back to my conclusions:

The whole code of anonbib is in python2. It makes no use of maybe
more usable and well maintained (or: well written, more general)
bibtex modules in python. They imported their BibTeX module from
a perl module (read the code for all the reasons I mention here).
I don't see myself pushing code in their direction, because I
would have to change lots of the code base. A non-issue which
needs to be fixed nevertheless is that they have python2
exlusively - and we are working on getting rid of python2.

The issues with python2 in the code:
It comes down to the choice of either fixing many of our entries to
their limited BibTeX implementation (which is the main cause of
errors, we have more valid BibTeX record types), something which in
some parts can not be done with sed, or extending the python2 code.
If you haven't read the python2 code, please do. It is really not
pleasant to read in some parts. Extending will take longer than I can
justify, which leads me to:

Last night I looked into jinja2 based bibtex->html. It is easy.  As we
already use jinja2, this makes more sense than maybe eventually
sending code to freehaven's anonbib. I'll write a separate website for
this in jinaj2 and a common used bibtex module. Later we can integrate
this into the mainwebsite, but it makes sense to keep them separate.
I hope this is alright, if it isn't someone else can continue with
anonbib.

1: Okay, I just remembered after writing this email that we discussed
   extensions to this before: we wanted some kind of search and other
   features.