I had previously mentioned adding support to Forester for Markdown. This week I added support for Bibtex too. From any *.bib file in your forest, Forester will now dutifully recognise it as a Bibtex file and convert, as best it can, all the entries into Reference trees.

I'm becoming quite convinced of this model at the moment. I'm using Forester's Code.t as a target representation. In fact, to ease the process, I really shouldn't spend all my time on my website, I have reused my Yaml.t -> Code.t and Markdown.t -> Code.t functions in the Bibtex parser.

To see it in action, you could have a look at the Build Systems à la Carte paper which is generated completely from Bibtex.

The eagled-eyed viewer may have noticed that the table of contents for this page has more than one level. I finally caved and spent an evening rejigging my Cmarkit.Doc.t -> Tree code which was hacky and broken and is now less hacky and less broken.

In addition, headings support links and emphasis etc.

I had a delightful lunch with Jon Sterling discussing the future of Forester, the nature of the Web (old and new) and the success posting weekly updates for our colleagues. Thanks Jon.

Whilst testing Shelter, I ended up wanting a way to programmatically invoke the different run commands. This is similar to say a Dockerfile, but maybe with a little more expressivity.

This lead me to revisit the Build systems à la Carte paper and rediscover selective applicative functors.

I started playing around with a selective applicative interface to Shelter, this would allow you to express your dependencies statically but select them dynamically (as the paper says).

module D = Shl (Identity)

let shelterfile =
  let open D in
  let base_image = from "alpine" in
  let is_node_lst img = String.equal "v22.15.0" (stdout img) in
  let cmds base =
    let node_version = run "node --version" base in
    Select.if'
      (Select.map ~f:is_node_lst node_version)
      (run "node -e 'console.log('success!')")
      (run "node -e 'console.log('failure!')")
      base
  in
  with_session "node" (cmds base_image)

From this, we get a slightly more expressive way to describe images.