Re: ActtivityPub and Haunt

[Christine Lemmer-Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 11:48 AM indieterminacy
> <indieterminacy@libre.brussels> wrote:
>>
>> In wider fediverse news,
>>
>> The ActivityPub webpage is getting a rejig:
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-from-standards-movement-to-grassroots-fedi/3577
>>
>> Im emailing, as within the technical discourse page is whether the tech
>> stack should be moved away from (scheme based) Haunt (which powers
>> Guix's website):
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-technical-discussion/3578
>>
>> Naturally, Id be keen on continuing the furrow carved by Christine
>> Lemmer-Webber and thought it would be worth seeing if there are any
>> Lispers here who would be keen on volunteering, lest the platform goes
>> Typescript.
>>
>> At my end, I consider the benefits to i18n to be a useful synergy:
>> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-rocks-portal-technical-discussion/3578/3
>>
>> If you agree, Id love you contribute your input there.
>
> I'm the creator and maintainer of Haunt. I can't volunteer time to
> maintain activitypub.rocks but I can help answer questions about Haunt
> and help with bug fixes, patch review, etc. for Haunt itself. Haunt
> posts can be written in Markdown, BTW.  You don't have to layer on the
> obscurity by using a format like Skribe (even though Skribe is cool.)
> I haven't integrated anything i18n related in Haunt itself because I
> don't know a lot about it, but Guix being able to add in i18n on top
> of what Haunt provides is a good sign that it's workable. I'm totally
> open to include built-in i18n features in future releases.
>
> I also understand and sympathize that keeping Haunt will probably be
> swimming upstream against the pressure to be more mainstream.  I guess
> a positive spin on things is that ActivityPub has succeeded enough to
> call attention to all the Scheme that was cleverly snuck in when
> Christine was the driving force of the project. It's been a small
> point of pride that activitypub.rocks was built with Haunt, so it
> would be a bit disappointing to see it go away, but I understand that
> whatever is easiest for the volunteers actually doing the work is the
> right thing. Scheme is *obviously* better than TypeScript, though. ;)
>
> - Dave

I'd love to see ap.rocks maintained in its Haunt form.  I'm not so sure
we're going to see it happen.  It's more important that it continues and
survives I suppose, ultimately... and the people maintaining it will
have to make the decisions on what tools they want to use.

But I will hands-down say that Haunt was an EXCELLENT environment for
writing ap.rocks.  The implementation guide page especially is a great
demonstration of Haunt's power:

  https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/

Check out reports.scm:

  https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/-/blob/master/www/reports.scm?ref_type=heads

Pretty cool, yeah?  Well, I thought so... I can't imagine doing anything
like that as easily in any of the other static site generators I've
used.

Which was autogenerated from reports that used the AP test suite (also
Guile based, and sadly long down... though someone's been working on
reviving (and rewriting) it...)

Haunt treats a website as a program and its output as evaluating that
program.  That combined with sxml is a really cool environment.  Most of
the rest of the world hasn't realized as such I guess.  Oh well...

 - Christine