Re: 'Pipe' export feature (was: Re: Bug #86375 can be closed...)

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Andrew Ferrier wrote:
> On 2002-07-16 at 14:10 -0700, Tim Ellis wrote:
> 
>> > Dia would have a configuration directory (something like
>> > /usr/share/dia/exportpipes.d).
>>
>> Overridden by ~/.dia/<thesame>
> 
> Maybe --- this would be a 'not much extra effort' feature. But
> tedia2sql and similar would be system-wide, would they not? I
> suppose a user might want to write their own, extra, wierd
> add-on.

They most certainly would.

>> > When programs such as tedia2sql got installed, they would
>> > install a configuration file in this directory which would
>> > specify what pipes, scripts etc. dia needed to use in order
>> > to transform the file from it's native .dia to (to use the
>> > example above) .sql. Each of these files would then appear
>> > as another export filter in Dia's export types list.
>>
>> This sounds like a better solution than what I had in mind.
> 
> Also, I think this would be best implemented using a special
> pseudo-export filter for dia, which would read the appropriate
> config. files and add the appropriate 'export file types'.
> 
> This seems a fairly major idea: what do the maintainers think?
> Should this be filed as a wishlist bug?

While a majorly useful idea, I think it'd be quite easy to implement as
well.  It's just a backend for the normal exporter.  Hmmm... if libxml has
some generic filter function (it has a specialized one for compression),
you could use that.  Seems it does: http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html

For a first implementation, I'd suggest not worrying about the config
files, just reading a shell line during export.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
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