Re: Help with sxml simple parser for the quicklisp importer

[Katherine Cox-Buday]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> writes:

> swedebugia <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> The second “link” tag opens but is never closed.  This may be valid
>>> HTML, but it is not valid XML, which is what xml->sxml expects.
>>
>> Thanks for the quick answer!
>> I will try to remove this line before handling over to the parser.
>
> I would recommend looking for a better source of package information.
> Parsing HTML is not fun and is often brittle.

The package information in quickdocs is accessed[1] via the API of
whatever is hosting the sourcecode. We could try doing the same.

Alternatively, it is good practice for CL systems defined in .asd files
to contain a `:description`, and even a `:long-description` field. We could
take the stance that package information simply comes from there as
technically this is the actual package's (i.e. system's) description.
And as CL is a lisp, it should be relatively easy to parse this out. The
only caveat is that I think it's possible for these fields to contain
sexps which read in other files, in which case we should do the same.

I hope this helps.

[1] - 
https://github.com/quickdocs/quickdocs-updater/blob/a64a41df9e5f1a3721ab68f9f02189ecbb54513b/src/repos.lisp

-- 
Katherine