[wwwdocs] Buildstat update for 4.3

[Tom G. Christensen]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 06:01:46PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Tom G. Christensen wrote:
> > I wrote some scripts to cross check the testresult archive against the
> > buildstat page.
> > They can assist in finding typos, misplaced links and missing results.
> 
> Very nice!  Looking at the result, your script indeed caught/fixed a 
> number of issues.
> 
I noticed some discrepancies after the last update and I thought it
would be nice to have at least some sort of helper when updating.

> Do you plan on providing this kind of input regularily going forward?
> That would be a nice contribution.
> 
I suppose it wouldn't be too much work to run these regularly, and create
patches.
Can I make further contributions to wwwdocs without needing to file
paperwork?

> I wonder whether we could ultimately achieve a state where your scripts
> would come up with a patch completely on their own?  After running them
> in attended mode for a while, we could then even consider just putting
> them into a cron job and having them send the results in parallel to 
> making changes directly.
> 
Well, they are not anywhere near being able to do anything by themselves
and in their current form they're not like to ever be.
Currently they just give hints and updating the page is then a
manual process. Hence the missing markup in the 4.2 page was caused by
me not paying enough attention when I updated the page.

The scripts are written in bash shellscript and uses some (bad) sed to
parse the HTML of the current buildstat page and the web archive of the
testresults list.
Getting the scripts in a state where they can take action on their own
or just produce patches for review will probably require starting
over using a proper HTML table parser.
I don't really want to spend time on that since the current scripts are
doing what I wanted them to. Also the amount of manual work is limited
especially if done regularly.

-tgc