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2024-06-16

Towards a proper FlightLog 12 -- Reducing Complexity

#flightlog

Complexity and its Little Brother Automation

My technical mind went into overengineering mode.

How about adding some MetaTags to a gemtext post and extract the post, the tags, the abstract, any timestamps from it and produce separate snippets to be concatenated as indices, included in feeds, and what not.
And while at it, how about a smarter way of preparing a published state, without scanning all files again for their tags and what not?
Ok, the price is fairly high, I would have to manually add all these missing MetaTags to some 200 old posts. Sigh.

Resisting the Lure

After making no progress for some time, I reconsidered. The capsule has now been overhauled and much of that growing complexity, äh, mess, rather, was cleared out.

I completely removed the "Deutsche Abteilung", it was only two or three posts anyway. Should I ever feel the urge, I can add it back in, or set up a separate capsule elsewhere.
I wanted to remove the ./en sub dir and add a sym-link instead, however, sourcehut ignores anything but ordinary files. For good reasons, that is. So I kept the sub directory in the hope to break not too many external references.
Reducing languages to just one simplifies scripting quite a bit. So those got a tidy up, as did the Makefile.
I divided the rather long tag index into one file per tag. That required editing of all posts, but I did that with a simple shell plus perl 1-liner script. It was fortunate, that I had reduced the number of tags previously.
One file per tag trivially produces a hub (or index) of my ribbons --- small collections of posts about a common theme, linked together to "follow the blue line through the capsule" --- although without any comments.
I was reminded AGAIN, that grep does return an error, if did not find anything! This is particularly irritating, when using "set -e", which I tend to do.

So, all in all, I'm happy that I could resist the lure of automation, the little brother of complexity.

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man grep

EXIT STATUS

Normally the exit status is 0 if a line is selected, 1 if no lines were selected, and 2 if an error occurred. However, if the -q or --quiet or --silent is used and a line is selected, the exit status is 0 even if an error occurred.

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