Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

My personal website (https://pablo.rauzy.name/) used to be generated using a simple Makefile.

Then I added features like news and an RSS feed, a way to automatically list my research publications and course materials, a list of books filterable with tags, etc. So now it still is a Makefile but the Makefile itself is a bit simpler than it used to be, but it calls a few Bash scripts that in particular make use of the awesome xml2 and 2xml utilities to be able to manipulate HTML in a line-oriented manner using the core utils (grep and sed mostly).

On top of that I have a few git hooks that call make automatically when needed, in particular on the remote server where the website is hosted so that the public version is rebuilt when I push updates the repository there.

It's been working like a charm for years! My git history goes back to 2009.

EDIT: I just had a look at the first commits…

    beccad7 (FIRST_VERSION) Initial commit
    d1cc6d7 adding link to Google Reader shared items
    6ccfd0c fix typo
    d337959 adding link to Identi.ca account

… 15 years have passed indeed.

> xml2 and 2xml utilities

Seems somewhat abandoned?

https://github.com/cryptorick/xml2

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/xml2/2xml.1.en.html

s/abandoned/crystalized/g

If converting markup to/from line format is your thing to put awk, perl, and other line-oriented tools to use, there's also the ESIS format understood by traditional SGML tools and used by SGML formal test suites even.

One of the nifty parts about having a static site generated offline from trusted inputs is that it doesn't matter whether the generator components are "abandoned" or complete.

Ehhh... assuming their dependencies and your operating system maintain compatibility with it on the order of decades, yes. Which do exist, but they're understandably rare.

And it's complicated by this only being knowable in retrospect, as you can't predict the future. "Not abandoned" is a positive sign for "if we failed to predict the future correctly, it'll be fixed", rather than mostly relying on luck.

(Thankfully full-blown simulation is often an option nowadays too)

Take a rootfs snapshot, have it available as a container.

I release all I need (including data) inside a docker container.

Running my website with 2 containers, one being the webserver and the other one the data container.

So only the registry need to be backuped.

> (Thankfully full-blown simulation is often an option nowadays too)

Yes, and I think its fair to assume that some backend to execute the x86-64 Linux ABI will out-live most readers.

Projects like https://justine.lol/ape.html, https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.... or https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle do make it approachable to "bundle" a lot of software down to libc.

FFS not everything needs constant churn.

Maybe it’s just mature? Sometimes projects actually become “finished” and don’t need any updating.

Upstream source repo is gone, there are a couple of stale GitHub mirrors/forks - and the package lacks a maintainer in Debian:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xml2

And eg Arch gets the code from Debian as far as I can tell:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xml2

I don't really expect there to be lots of new features - but bug fixes seem likely even for a mature utility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com