[maemo-developers] Enriching the Application Manager scripting experience

[From: Neil Jerram]

Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> writes:

>>> I managed to sneak a bit of Lisp into the Application Manager, but I
>>> kept it enterprise ready by hiding it behind XML.  So while the new
>>> way of writing .install files looks quite verbose, it is really quite
>>> simple.

Simple maybe, but definitely ugly.

> I myself prefer the S-expression approach:
>
>    (install-instructions
>      (update-catalogues
>        (catalogue
>          (tag "com.foobar.repository.automatic")
>          (version 0)
>          (name (en_GB "Foobar Catalogue")
>                (de_DE "Foobar Katalog"))
>          (uri "http://example.com/")
>          (dist automatic)
>          (components "main")))
>      (install-packages
>        (pkg "maemo-foo")))
>
> which can be shortened to
>
>    (install-instructions
>      (update-catalogues
>        ((tag "com.foobar.repository.automatic" 0)
>         (name (en_GB "Foobar Catalogue")
>               (de_DE "Foobar Katalog"))
>         (deb "http://example.com/" automatic "main")))
>      (install-packages "maemo-foo"))
>
> Maybe I go with this approach if XML turns out to be too unwieldy.

+1  Much nicer.

Regards,
     Neil