Re: Existing translators

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

> > Several funny or at least interesting examples of translators are given in
> > most Hurd presentations (such as Marcus' talk and Wolfgang's HHG). Among
> > them are the fortune translator and also more useful translators such as a
> > tar+gzip/bzip2 translator which would allow to `mount' an archive.
>
> I never seen something about those presentation, do you've got a link?

Marcus Brinkmann's talk is available on http://hurd.gnu.org and the (unofficial)
Hurd Hacking Guide can be found at http://www.8ung.at/shell/hhg.html . BTW, I
think this guide is really a good idea; however, it lacks an example for
libnetfs. ;) Any idea of which translator in the Hurd source tree would be a 
good
one to look at to get a feel of libnetfs?

> I once wrote a fortune translator, the code is really ugly and it can use
> only one cookie database.  It isn't released yet. The translator can be set 
> with:
> 
> settrans -ac cookie ./fortunet ./startrek
> 
> If someone is really interested I am willing to make the code more readable
> and upload it somewhere :). 

I think it would be nice if we could have some kind of a central repository
where we could put all the translators that have been written so far, including
the fortune translator of course. ;) I believe there is not yet a huge number of
Hurd users and translator writers so having such a repository could be both
useful for Hurd users and motivating for those who haven't had a chance yet to
write a translator or who are looking for concrete example of what a translator
could bring to the end-user.

Ludovic.