Re: [MacPerl] SDF - How to set-up?

["David C. Schooley" <schooley@ee.gatech.edu>]

At 12:50 AM -0500 on 1/26/98, Tom Fetherston supposedly said:

[snip]

>Folloeing the link, <http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf>, I found that SDF
>stands for Simple Doocument Format, and is sort of POD on steroids, in fact
>POD is one of the many formats that a SDF file can be translated into.
>
>I been looking for something that would support literate programming on the
>mac, and SDF is supposed to support this.
>
>Anyway, the best thing is that this is that the system that works with is
>written entirely in Perl.
>
>However, the directions are only for Unix and windows:
>    1.Unpack the distribution into a directory
>    2.Set the SDFHOME environment variable
>    3.Add the SDF scripts to your path
>    4.Update the configuration files
>
>One is easy enough (download and unzip with zip-it), baut can anyone help
>me with the rest?
>

[snip]

I have messed with SDF some on unix, and I toyed with getting it to work under MPW perl. I use MPW perl almost exclusively these days, but things shouldn't have to change very much when using the MacPerl application. 

Step 1 (from above): This should be trivial.

Step 2, SDFHOME: I just set an MPW enviroment variable and it SDF seemed to like it. You may need some sort of wrapper to make it work with MacPerl.

Step 3. Ignore this one.

Step 4. You can probably ignore this one too, but see below. 

The documention implies that SDF runs on the Mac, but I don't think the author ever tried it. The SDF perl code assumes that /name1/name2/ is an absolute path and name1/name2 is relative, and that won't work on a Mac. My solution was to rewrite (hack?) sdf/perllib/sdf/name.pl so that it does the right thing, at least most (some?) of the time... I managed to get SDF to spit out some html files, but it died when I tried MIF, and at that point, I gave up. The SDF2MIF converter was unable to find some files it needed and the problem seemed to be a path-name issue

I only spent a few hours on it. You might have more success with a more careful modification of name.pl. I might be willing to give it another whirl, but I don't have my original modifications any more.

The configuration files are in sdf/bin. sdf.ini is a configuration file, and looks a lot like a Windows .ini file. It specifies some options, but I never needed to mess with it under unix. sdf.ini specifies some file locations, but the path separators are converted by name.pl, so you should probably leave those alone.

later,

---Dave---





=========================================================
David C. Schooley              | "Success is how high you
Ph.D. in progress              |  bounce after you hit
Georgia Tech Electric Power    |  bottom. 
mailto:schooley@ece.gatech.edu |   - General George S. Patton
http://www.ee.gatech.edu/users/schooley/



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