[rescue] rss/rdf/perl off-topic rant/help

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Well... here I am posting an off topic post... but out of all the
"hangouts" I have, this one has a nice wide diversity of people/skills
out there.... so please excuse the off topic post (off topic posts are
a very very small minority of my posts... but I will try to throw 
something in here on topic... (I'm running it on a P200MMX Solaris for
Intel box.... does that count ? :-) )....

I've about had it with perl.  I used to love perl, but here is a
diagram of the dependencies required for the module I want to try
(note try... I may not even decide to use it !):

XML-RSS-Tools-0.13_5
 |
 |- XML-LibXSLT-1.53
 |- XML-LibXML-1.56
 |   |
 |   |- libxml2 2.4.20 (c library)
 |   |- XML-LibXML-Common-0.13
 |   |	 |
 |   |	 `- libxml2 2.4.20 (c library)
 |   |- XML-SAX-0.12
 |   |	 |
 |   |	 |- File-Temp-0.14
 |   |	 |   |
 |   |	 |   `- File-Spec-0.86
 |   |	 `- XML-NamespaceSupport-1.08
 |   `- XML-NamespaceSupport-1.08
 |- libwww-perl-5.72
 |   |
 |   |- URI-1.27
 |   |- MIME-Base64-2.21
 |   |- HTML-Parser-3.33
 |   |	 |
 |   |	 |- HTML-Tagset-3.03
 |   |	 `- libwww-perl-5.72
 |   |- libnet-1.17
 |   `- Digest-MD5-2.30
 `- URI-1.27

Well, if that alone doesn't make me sick... running perl Makefile.PL
on XMl-LibXML-1.53 and up causes perl to core dump with a segmentation
violation....  I've gotten by that one by removing the dependency in
the Makefile.PL for XML::LibXML::Common from the PREREQ_PM
structure/variable.... (don't ask me why that makes it not bomb... it
does bomb later on during make install with :

\t\@\$(PERL) -MXML::SAX -e
"XML::SAX->add_parser(q(XML::LibXML::SAX::Parser))->save_parsers()"
\t\@\$(PERL) -MXML::SAX -e
"XML::SAX->add_parser(q(XML::LibXML::SAX))->save_parsers()"

Now, even if I'm to trust the XML::LibXML I've installed I can't
perl Makefile.PL for XML-LibXSLT-1.53... same core dump problem
(at the same point...  a return statement from the MakeMaker call).

Why perl bombs on a return statement I'll never understand... using
the perl debugger, I can use the 'x' command to dump out the content
of what is returned....  

I've come to the conclusion that perl is great... but I think people
have taken it too far with all this module crap and module dependency
crap..... I've never had such a hard time with it.

I have problems under the Sun bundled perl (5.005003) and a freshly
compbiled and installed perl 5.8.1.

This is under Solaris 8 on Intel.

So.... enough of the rant part....  I merely want to include some
RSS/RDF content into a website.... (seems trivial enough.. no ?).

I was hoping to do it in perl, as I was going to have perl use LWP
to fetch the RSS content, parse it, and output HTML that I could then
include in my php pages with readfile().

I'm also looking at a PHP class called CaRP (http://www.mouken.com/rss/)
which will cache the information giving me somewhat of what I was trying
to obtain with perl.

I did get XML/RSS parsing working (no translation to HTML) with
XML::RSS:Parser.... but depending on the site I use, the 'keys'
(based on RSS namespaces) vary depending on the rss version... so I
was looking for something better/easier and that could more easily
handle a translation into HTML (flexibly of course :-) ).

Could this with the fact I barely have a basic understanding of
XML/RSS/RDF.... boy did I get behind in web technologies....

And all the complexity over something I could probably parse with
simple perl or regex if I want to be completely ignorant of standards
and watch my stuff break for not following them as the sites I pull
content from evolve.... <sigh>

Here is the dependencies for XMl::RSS::Parser (needs far less
modules)....

XML-RSS-Parser-0.21
 |
 |- XML-Parser-2.34
	|
	|-expat (non Perl)

So... given all this, does anyone have any recommendations on a
relatively straightforward way of doing this....  Despite the 
complexity of using XML-RSS-Tools-0.13_5 I liked how it used XSLT
(despite the fact I'd rather not have to learn that) for flexibility
of translating the XMl/RSS into HTML.

OK... enough rant/crying for help....

To put some more ontopic in here for those that have read this far:

Still looking for:

Xenix for Altos 886
Originals CDs of IRIX 4.X for Indigo, Indy, Indigo 2, etc
Memory boards for Sun2/120
sparc cpu/ethernet/scsi/etc boards for Sun2/120
internal tape drive for Sun2/120
Sun x/150 VME enclosure
Sun 1 :-)
Sun 2/50
cheap inch height 18g or 36G SCSI drives.... qty 12 or more of
matching vendor/model

-- Curt