<div dir="ltr">On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 1:30 AM, Robert Bruninga <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bruninga@usna.edu" target="_blank">bruninga@usna.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><div dir="ltr"><div><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt">6) Although I came up with this expansion room just for this purpose, I am totally swamped and cannot take it on bit by bit. If someone would like to be the symbol CZAR to collect all of the desires, and organize them, and then make a well thought out and justified proposal, that would help.<br>
<br></span></font></div><div><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt">I just found another link: <a href="http://aprs.org/symbols.html" target="_blank">http://aprs.org/symbols.html</a><br><br></span></font></div>
<div><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt">So that is another job, go through all of my evolved documents on Symbols </span></font><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt">piece by piece </span></font>and identify any conflicts, overlaps, errors and make any specific recommendations on how I can clean them up.<br>
<br></span></font></div><div><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12pt">The main entry points are aprs11.html, aprs12.html, symbols.html and then all of the symbol related .TXT files they point to. What a mess.<br>
</span></font></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div style>Whatever comes out of this should be produced in the form of a</div><div style><br></div><div style>MACHINE READABLE CONFIGURATION FILE</div><div style>
<br></div><div style>(JSON, XML, CSV, or YAML file) that could be loaded into different client applications, without any need for the client software author to manually track magic human-readable .html / .txt files in various URLs. That sort of work is a completely unnecessarily duplicated effort for us all.</div>
<div style><br>Such a configuration file defining symbols could possibly even be</div><div style><br></div><div style>UPDATED AUTOMATICALLY</div><div style><br></div><div style>to different client applications around the world, by those clients downloading it from somewhere, without any need for the application author to actually build and redistribute a new version of the client.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Something like this happens already: People can actually download Steven's icon set files and install them in UI-View and a number of other apps (that's what I put in <a href="http://aprs.fi">aprs.fi</a> actually). It's the closest thing to a standard we have now! Too bad it only includes graphics, and not the text definitions.</div>
<div><br></div><div style>I currently manually maintain the Ham::APRS::DeviceID module, which contains a machine-readable definition of APRS device identifiers (tocalls, mic-e identifiers). Take a look at <a href="http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/HESSU/Ham-APRS-DeviceID-1.06/DeviceID.pm">http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/HESSU/Ham-APRS-DeviceID-1.06/DeviceID.pm</a> and scroll back a bit to see the <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);white-space:pre-wrap">@dstcall_regexps</span> hash definition. I have to manually track changes in <a href="http://www.aprs.org/aprs11/tocalls.txt">http://www.aprs.org/aprs11/tocalls.txt</a> and update them in my code. If tocalls.txt was published in a machine-readable config file format, that could simply be read in and used by all the client apps, without the need for everyone to manually track quiet changes in tocalls.txt.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Maybe I should extract that stuff from DeviceID's perl code and publish it in YAML format instead. That'd make it more usable for APRSIS32 and other apps in other languages. Lynn, would you be interested in using that for device identification?</div>
<div><br></div><div style>- Hessu</div><div style><br></div></div></div></div>