Re: MSL/Conjure - Documentation

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008, Max wrote:

> Hi there,
> I added missing elements and attributes as far as they made sense to me.
> I also added an example for composite since it's not that
> straightforward to use.

Thanks for the patch.

> I would like to make a new example for the image element since the one
> in the documentation is not even valid XML!
> The only problem: I couldn't figure out what it is supposed to do.
> Any ideas?

Alas, sometimes it is necessary to reverse engineer.  The inventors of 
MSL are no longer active on the project.  If necessary I can contact 
one of them to see if he remembers how the syntax is supposed to work.

> BTW: The scripts in the doc folder use /usr/bin/sed but my sed is in
> /bin/sed (and I don't think that's very exotic).
> Of course ln can help here but I suggest to assume that
> sed is always in $PATH ...

Every system I have here (Cygwin, MSYS/MinGW, Solaris, FreeBSD, 
Apple's OS-X) supports /usr/bin/sed but several do not support 
/bin/sed.  The reason why this path is used is that the sed scripts 
are quite challenging and some popular sed programs crash or produce 
wrong output.

> I'm using MSL mainly because I have to composite several image, resize
> them and apply filters afterwards.
> The code is generated by XSLT.
> I couldn't figure out how to this in the shell with one command (and
> even if I would have this oneliner would probably be unreadable).
> And starting one process for every step is a huge overhead.
> Perhaps one paragraph about the use cases and advantages of MSL would be
> helpful.

Obviously there are substantial advantages to using MSL when using a 
higher-level scripting/programming language is too cumbersome or the 
MSL can be generated on demand as a recipe from another program.  The 
poor documentation for MSL has been one of the impediments to people 
using it.  My own knowledge of MSL is very poor since while I was 
around when it was invented, I did not participate in inventing it. 
Your contributions are very much appreciated.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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