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I am happy to announce there is now a RSS feed for getting news in case of new
packages available on my repository
[https://stable.perso.pw/](https://stable.perso.pw/)
The file is available at [https://stable.perso.pw/rss.xml](https://stable.perso.pw/rss.xml).
I take the occasion of this blog post to explain how the file is generated as I
did not find easy tool for this task, so I ended up doing it myself.
I choosed to use **XSLT**, which is not quite common. Briefly, **XSLT** allows
to use some kind of XML template on a XML data file, this allow loops,
filtering etc... It requires only two parts: the template and the data.
The following file is a template for my RSS file, we can see a few tags
starting by `xsl` like `xsl:for-each` or `xsl:value-of`.
It's interesting to note that the `xsl-for-each` can use a condition like
`position < 10` in order to limit the loop to the 10 first items.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<description></description>
<!-- BEGIN CONFIGURATION -->
<title>OpenBSD unofficial stable packages repository</title>
<link>https://stable.perso.pw/</link>
<atom:link href="https://stable.perso.pw/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<!-- END CONFIGURATION -->
<!-- Generating items -->
<xsl:for-each select="feed/news[position()<10]">
<item>
<title>
<xsl:value-of select="title"/>
</title>
<description>
<xsl:value-of select="description"/>
</description>
<pubDate>
<xsl:value-of select="date"/>
</pubDate>
</item>
</xsl:for-each>
</channel>
</rss>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Now, we need some data to use with the template.
I've added a comment block so I can copy / paste it to add a new entry into the
RSS easily. As the date is in a painful format to write for a human, I added to
my Makefile starting the commands a call to a script replacing the string DATE
by the current date with the correct format.
<feed>
<news>
<title>www/mozilla-firefox</title>
<description>Firefox 67.0.1</description>
<date>Wed, 05 Jun 2019 06:00:00 GMT</date>
</news>
<!-- copy paste for a new item
<news>
<title></title>
<description></description>
<date></date>
</news>
-->
</feed>
I love makefiles, so I share it even if this one is really short.
all:
sh replace_date.sh
xsltproc template.xml news.xml | xmllint -format - | tee rss.xml
scp rss.xml perso.pw:/home/stable/
clean:
rm rss.xml
When I want to add an entry, I copy / paste the comment block in news.xml, add
DATE, run `make` and it's uploaded :)
The command **xsltproc** is available from the package **libxslt** on OpenBSD.
And then, after writing this, I realise that manually editing the result file
rss.xml is as much work as editing the news.xml file and then process it with
xslt... But I keep that blog post as this can be useful for more complicated
cases. :)