[GTALUG] Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of the GRUB documentation

[Giles Orr via talk]

I've finally released a document I've been working on for a while:

"Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of
the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )

Daniel did the editing, and set me on this path in the first place with his
own interest in GRUB. The GRUB DSL is somewhat similar to an older version
of a Linux shell, but documentation of its functionality online is poor to
non-existent. Don't get me wrong: GRUB has a lot of documentation of
individual commands, but how you can assemble them into useful scripts is
barely documented at all. (Yup, its an uncommon application realm.) My
greatest frustration with GRUB's DSL is the lack of redirection and pipes
(I understand why they're not there - but it would be nice to have them).

I hope this is helpful to someone!

-----

As a technical side note, I learned the basics of LaTeX in an attempt to
create this document in that language (I'd been wanting to learn it for
years). LaTeX is supposed to be able to generate not only PostScript and
PDF, but also HTML. But it turns out the HTML generator isn't nearly as
well maintained as the PDF generator, and in the end I could find no way to
implement my code examples in such a way that the HTML generator wouldn't
fail on them. I also found the language unnecessarily complex for what I
was trying to achieve and ultimately switched to raw HTML (which you see
above). LaTeX may have been a poor choice. :-)

[Christopher Browne via talk]

Post by Giles Orr via talk
"Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of
the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )

Thanks indeed!

Pretty awesome to have more documentation for this mysterious area.

I'm not sure it'll lead to me doing fanciful things with grub, but, well,
possibly... ;-)

[David Mason via talk]

I use LaTeX for everything - most particularly for papers and lecture slides. I haven’t used it in a while, but HeVeA (http://hevea.inria.fr/) is the best way to convert LaTeX to HTML.  When I last used it, it was quite effective. And it is quite focussed on including code in documents.

../Dave

"Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )
Daniel did the editing, and set me on this path in the first place with his own interest in GRUB.  The GRUB DSL is somewhat similar to an older version of a Linux shell, but documentation of its functionality online is poor to non-existent.  Don't get me wrong: GRUB has a lot of documentation of individual commands, but how you can assemble them into useful scripts is barely documented at all.  (Yup, its an uncommon application realm.)  My greatest frustration with GRUB's DSL is the lack of redirection and pipes (I understand why they're not there - but it would be nice to have them).
I hope this is helpful to someone!
     -----
As a technical side note, I learned the basics of LaTeX in an attempt to create this document in that language (I'd been wanting to learn it for years).  LaTeX is supposed to be able to generate not only PostScript and PDF, but also HTML.  But it turns out the HTML generator isn't nearly as well maintained as the PDF generator, and in the end I could find no way to implement my code examples in such a way that the HTML generator wouldn't fail on them.  I also found the language unnecessarily complex for what I was trying to achieve and ultimately switched to raw HTML (which you see above).  LaTeX may have been a poor choice.  :-)
--
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
---
Talk Mailing List
https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

[Giles Orr via talk]

Interesting: it may be that the default to-html plugin is older and not
maintained and that HeVeA has replaced it for all practical purposes ...
but if you don't know that you're out of luck? I didn't know it, and the
default to-html was a major failure. I did search around and don't recall
seeing HeVeA mentioned. Anyway, too late for me and I'm good with my
decision as HTML is easier to maintain - for me, and probably in general.

Post by David Mason via talk
I use LaTeX for everything - most particularly for papers and lecture
slides. I haven’t used it in a while, but HeVeA (http://hevea.inria.fr/)
is the best way to convert LaTeX to HTML. When I last used it, it was
quite effective. And it is quite focussed on including code in documents.
../Dave
"Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of
the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )
Daniel did the editing, and set me on this path in the first place with
his own interest in GRUB. The GRUB DSL is somewhat similar to an older
version of a Linux shell, but documentation of its functionality online is
poor to non-existent. Don't get me wrong: GRUB has a lot of documentation
of individual commands, but how you can assemble them into useful scripts
is barely documented at all. (Yup, its an uncommon application realm.) My
greatest frustration with GRUB's DSL is the lack of redirection and pipes
(I understand why they're not there - but it would be nice to have them).
I hope this is helpful to someone!
-----
As a technical side note, I learned the basics of LaTeX in an attempt to
create this document in that language (I'd been wanting to learn it for
years). LaTeX is supposed to be able to generate not only PostScript and
PDF, but also HTML. But it turns out the HTML generator isn't nearly as
well maintained as the PDF generator, and in the end I could find no way to
implement my code examples in such a way that the HTML generator wouldn't
fail on them. I also found the language unnecessarily complex for what I
was trying to achieve and ultimately switched to raw HTML (which you see
above). LaTeX may have been a poor choice. :-)
--
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
---
Talk Mailing List
https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

[John Sellens via talk]

I'm a big LaTeX fan for more than a short while. Lately for
multi-destination documents I've found that asciidoc has
worked well as a source for some documents.

I convert asciidoc to docbook, then to pdf, HTML, etc., most via LaTeX.


On Tue, 2018/10/16 11:11:32AM -0400, David Mason via talk <***@gtalug.org> wrote:
| I use LaTeX for everything - most particularly for papers and lecture slides. I haven’t used it in a while, but HeVeA (http://hevea.inria.fr/) is the best way to convert LaTeX to HTML.  When I last used it, it was quite effective. And it is quite focussed on including code in documents.
|
| ../Dave
---
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