GAZETTE MATTERS
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     * [30]Back issues of lg as pdbs
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Back issues of lg as pdbs

   Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:56:12 -0000 (GMT)
   Alan Pope ([31]alan from popey.com)

   Hi all,

   I spoke with Thomas on IRC last night about this but it was late and I'm not
   sure I made myself clear.

   I'd like to be able to read the lg on my palm device. Now I know I can click
   the TWDT link on the front page of the site, whereupon some magic cgi-bin
   foo generates a pdb file for me to download. I guess this is taking the text
   version of TWDT and generating the pdb on the fly?

   My question is this. That process is fine and dandy for the current release,
   but I'd like to read older issues on my palm. Can the pdbs be made available
   on the ftp site?

     [Sluggo] linuxgazette.net doesn't have an FTP site. It now uses a portion
     of the website for tarball downloads.

     The biggest issue with putting Palm-format files in that directory is they
     will be picked up by the mirrors. We'd have to check with the mirrors
     whether the bandwidth/size would be a hardship. We also look at how widely
     used the files would be. The tarballs can be used on any platforms with
     any OS. Palm files work only with certain brands of palmtops and exclude
     everything else.

     [Thomas] Hence I agree that generating them on-the-fly (talking of that,
     congratulations, Ben!!) is a far better thing to do.

     [Ben] Actually, AFAIK, the Palm Reader is available for several different
     platforms; certainly for Wind0ws, WinCE and both of the Linux distros made
     for the iPaq. However, I agree that we shouldn't clutter our tarballs with
     these things; that was the point of doing this stuff "on the fly" for the
     folks who want it.

   I could convert the files myself I suppose which would probably involve
   lynxing the TWDT text version of the file and then using "some tool" to
   generate the pdb from the .txt file. However I just wondered if as that
   particular wheel has already been invented, it might save some work? 

   Cheers, Al. 

     [Ben] Nope, there's nothing set up. I'd suggest grabbing "bibelot" from
     [32]Freshmeat  and converting whichever TWDT you'd like. Here's the
     simplest way I can think of:

     lynx -dump -nolist [33]http://linuxgazette.net/issueXX/TWDT.html|bibelot
     -f -t twdtXX.pdb

     where XX is the number of the issue. If you wanted to do a bunch of them
     in one shot, you could even do a "for" loop:

for n in `seq $first $last`; do ... done

     where $first and $last would delimit the range of issues that you want to
     convert.

   Sure, and I wasn't suggesting that you should add pdb to the tarball or the
   ftp server, just asking if the process is already there to generate pdbs,
   why not make it available for back issues too? 

   Hence me saying why reinvent the wheel. 

   I don't have a problem downloading the TWDTs and converting them, just
   thought it would be easier to use whats already there. 

   Cheers, Al. 
     _________________________________________________________________

      This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette
HTML script maintained by [34]Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services,
                       [35]http://www.starshine.org/ 
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   Published in Issue 101 of Linux Gazette, April 2004

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