On Mittwoch, 27. Mai 2009, Jan Janak wrote: Hi Jan, do you mean the tools directory? Hm, not sure what then the purpose of the scripts directory would be, perhaps this could be then removed? I refactored the k XSL scripts (which were imported from SER) in the last year somewhat and also improved/ added support for DBs!=mysql. They do IMHO a good job now to generate the needed database scripts from XML sources, so i don't see a big need to rework them. What i removed was the possibility to also create insert statements, i think, not sure if this is needed from SER. The utils directory content is also missing. Henning

On Mittwoch, 27. Mai 2009, Daniel-Constantin Mierla wrote: Hi Daniel, In db_berkeley is a recovery tool for crash recovery or something like this, should be used from the admin. The db_oracle contains a basic command line client as replacement for SQLplus, i think, this is used from the oracle (db)ctl scripts. doc/database is an empty directory that is only used for the generated database documentation, thus there is nothing to import. The doc/dbschema contains the XSL schemes that are used to generate the SQL/ database sources, the table docs and this experimental code generation stuff that is used from a few modules. Cheers, Henning

Henning, On 27-05 15:04, Henning Westerholt wrote: Currently the script directory contains all the database related script, and some stuff that is not being used much (or at all), i.e. filter_log.sh, serstats, kam_to_sr.sh. I think we can use the scripts directory to store supporting scripts that people typically run once or occasionally. The tools directory could than be used for all other admin related tools, such as sercmd, gen_ha1, kamdbctl. We can also get rid of the utils directory. I think that xsltproc (or XSLT) is the wrong tool for the job. If you take a look at the conversion scripts, they use lots of variables, conditional statements, recursions, and functions specified in the XPath specification. In other words, we use xlst as a real programming language, but unlike many other languages available today, it has horrible syntax. Heck, even Perl scripts are more readable than XSLT. XSLT is probably OK if you want to generate something that looks like XML out of a XML document, but if you try to build an output with a less regular syntax, like the SQL scripts or dbtext scripts we generate, you are stuck with all those extension functions from XPath, here are prime examples of its cumbersome syntax: <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space($select/name[@db=$db])"/> <xsl:value-of select="translate(normalize-space($select/type[@db=$db]), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')"/> The first statement is an equivalent of the function trim which removes leading and trailing whitespace and the second statement converts a string to lower case. Another major problem is that the scripts are not portable. They work with xsltproc but would not work with other xsl processors due to subtle differences in implementation. I couldn't even generate a consistent output across different versions of xsltproc. If I had to write such scripts again, I would have chosen another language, probably Python or Perl. They are both wide-spread, they have decent XML parsers and less terryfing syntax (well, in case of perl this is questionable :-). With python or perl we could do much more than just generate plain-text output, we could create the tables directly in the database, setup usernames and passwords, handle backups and upgrades conveniently in one tool, and so on. While writing those scripts in XSLT was a good experience, I think we are using the language outside its domain. But at least we learned it, which is good if one needs to modify the docbook xslt scripts, for example. Jan.