Re: [Tools-discuss] New tool: bibxml2rfc

[Henrik Levkowetz <henrik at levkowetz.com>]

On 2008-03-20 16:09 Eric Rescorla said the following:
> I've just put up a prototype version of a new tool: bibxml2rfc,
> which is a reference tool for xml2rfc in the style of bibtex.
> 
> URL: https://svn.resiprocate.org/rep/ietf-drafts/ekr/bibxml2rfc

Hey!  This is written in Python!  I can read this comfortably!  :-)

> Here's the description from the internal documentation.

...

>      When handed an XML file, bibxml2rfc tries to identify the
>      references and construct an appropriate bibliography. The
>      general procedure is as follows:

How to use this wasn't entirely clear to me until I read the
bibxml2rfc-merge code.  So to use this, you add 2 external entity
definitions to your xml2rfc source file, one for the normative and
one for the informative reference files, and use those in their
appropriate reference section.  This replaces the individual entity
definitions for external bibxml* files.

Then you run bibxml2rfc on the source file, which will have the
effect of downloading needed references if not already in the cache,
and building the two files holding references.  If you're off-line,
references not in the local cache will be present in the generated
files with dummy content, so you can run xml2rfc on the source file
without being held up.  If you're on-line, new files will be added
to the cache.  Files already in the cache won't be checked for
updates (should that optionally be done?).

Did I get that right?

>      - Find all <xref> elements in the XML file (<file>)
>      - Extract the "target" attributes.
>      - Look in the local bibliography cache (references/) for files
>        named <target>.xml.
>      - If no cached entry is found or the the target appears to be
>        an I-D (starts with "I-D."), then try to fetch an entry out
>        of the appropriate repository on xml.resource.org.
>      - Build two files:
>        + <file>-normative containing reference entries for the
>          normative references
>        + <file>-informative containing reference entries for the
>          informative references
>      
>      bibxml2rfc determines whether a reference is normative or
>      informative by looking at the 'norm' attribute in the <xref>
>      element. If it is 'true', then the reference is normative.
>      Note that a single instance of 'norm="true"' is sufficient
>      to mark a reference normative, so if multiple <xref> elements
>      are present, only one need be so marked.
> 
> There's also a simple tool (bibxml2rfc-merge) to produce merged
> xml2rfc files for submission.
> 
> Arguably, this should be part of xml2rfc proper, but I was in
> a bit of a hurry and this was the easiest thing for me to write.
> Comments, bugs, etc. welcome.

Neat! 

	Henrik
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