Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of the GRUB documentation
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. :-) -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
On Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 9:16 AM Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
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/ )
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... ;-)
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 On Oct 16, 2018, 9:16 AM -0400, Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org>, wrote:
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. :-)
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/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. On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 11:11, David Mason <dmason@ryerson.ca> 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 On Oct 16, 2018, 9:16 AM -0400, Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org>, wrote:
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. :-)
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
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 <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
participants (4)
-
Christopher Browne -
David Mason -
Giles Orr -
John Sellens