Diary 2021-08-29

By Max Woerner Chase

So, uh, funny story. I made a little progress on MOTR today, and I may or may not have judged enough SoME1 entries; I'll try to get a few more tomorrow to be sure. I thought I was going to work on the worldbuilding that I mentioned, for a setting tentatively called Korín, but, um...

"Hey, I write these blog posts in reStructuredText, and it works out pretty well. Why don't I write up the worldbuilding using Sphinx instead of just haphazardly jammed into a text file? ... Okay, I've got the basics set up, but, oh yeah, sphinx-quickstart generates makefiles. And my kneejerk reaction to makefiles is to rewrite them in Python. Just like I did for the blog. Welp, I guess I'm doing this."

I used Invoke instead of MOTR, because Invoke is pretty much always going to be superior to MOTR for replacing Sphinx's makefiles. (No concurrency machinery, not required to use dependency specification...) I mean, unless I created a MOTR builder specifically to replicate the functionality (which... wouldn't be a terrible thing for me to have around), and even then, there'd be some minor differences. Anyway, bashing it together with Invoke is quicker for now, but, on reflection, putting this functionality into MOTR might be good as a proof-of-concept/evaluation of the idea of writing high-level code into the app library. (Plus, I'm going to need a more targeted sphinx-build wrapper later anyway...) (Actually, it wouldn't really work that well, because of the concurrency. MOTR doesn't print command output to its standard output or standard error streams, so it's not really convenient to get information out of these command-line runs. I judged this to be an acceptable tradeoff for the case of "running as many things at the same time as my computer allows", but running sphinx-build is... not that.)

Anyway, now it's closing in on 11 PM and I'm going "Oh, yeah, I need an outline."

So, um, I guess I'm signing off for now and working on that outline.

Good night.