Again on feeds in Gemini format

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

I still am not a fan of this format[1] and I think your rationale
here doesn't really make sense.

> running feed generators, parsers and aggregators

I will limit this to just parsers, as acdw has pointed out how easy
generation is. And the main difficulty of aggregating is just parsing.

> 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..

I don't see how any of these can't run C code that parses feeds. We must
remember, there is a lower bound to anything Gemini can use: it has to
be able to handle TLS. See 2.13 of the FAQ[2].

If your machine can do TLS, I don't see why it can't parse some XML.

> 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.

Not sure exactly what you're picturing, but can you not run compiled code
here? Do you mean the only code you can run is POSIX shell, maybe awk?
What real world environment is this?


1: gemini://makeworld.gq/gemlog/2020-11-16-re_aggregator_idea.gmi
2: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi


makeworld