Again on feeds in Gemini format

[acdw (Case)]

On 11/18/20 7:12 PM, Emilis wrote:

> I wholeheartedly disagree with the opinion that Atom/RSS (or JSON feeds) 
> should be enough for everybody.
> 
> The point is - some of us are not thinking about running feed 
> generators, parsers and aggregators on developer laptops, workstations, 
> modern servers we own, etc..
> 
> We are thinking about running these programs on computers where we have 
> limited permissions, OpenWRT routers, experimental SBCs, old netbooks 
> and rooted phones that cannot be updated to any recent distros, etc..
> 
> In these situations even Python (widespread as it is) may not be 
> available, may be too resource-hungry or may not have the option to be 
> updated or extended with libraries.
> 
> What we need is the ability to process feeds with a bare minimum of 
> tools (e.g. a POSIX shell, BusyBox, etc.). Parsing XML and JSON is not 
> feasible in these situations.

Just as a proof of concept, at least generating Atom feeds using plain 
shell script (plus a little extra) is possible.  See my new project, 
gemshimfeed:

https://git.sr.ht/~acdw/gemshimfeed

It only depends on GNU find and stat, both of which can be replaced 
easily at run time.  Or hell, it's a shell script, you can edit it 
yourself :)

As far as parsing an Atom feed goes, that's a little tricker -- but I 
think gemshimfeed shows it's not hard to generate the feed.  I 
implemented this without even reading the spec, I think; I just read the 
Wikipedia article on the protocol.

-- 
~acdw (Case)
www.acdw.net | breadpunk.club/~breadw