[Sugar-devel] Some thoughts on GetBooks activity

[James Simmons]

Back in 2009 I wrote the Get IA Books activity which uses the Advanced
Search service of the Internet Archive to search their catalog and makes it
possible to download these books to the Journal and put some metadata in
there as well.

Shortly after I finished this Sayamindu Dasgupta made a similar Activity
that used OPDS to search book catalogs. Specifically he was interested in
using OPDS to search https://www.feedbooks.com, which had an OPDS server
that included public domain books. He also made it possible for the
Activity user to add an entry for his own OPDS server, but you had to edit
a text file using the Terminal activity to do it.

I have just fixed my own Activity to work with Python 3 and wanted to try
fixing this one too. I've run into a few problems which makes me think this
Activity might not be fixable.

1. Feedbooks.com is going out of business very soon. It is possible that
their OPDS server is already not working:
https://www.feedbooks.com/catalog/public_domain
2. There are other ODPS servers, but not for public domain titles:
http://opdshome.uo1.net/
3. The Internet Archive has an OPDS server but this Activity doesn't use
it. Instead it adapted code from my GetIABooks activity. Apparently the IA
OPDS server had issues when this was written.
3. The Activity makes use of code from http://feedparser.org/.
Unfortunately, the latest version of this cannot be contained in just one
file. The old version depends on sgmllib.py, which was included with Python
2 but not with 3. Somebody found the code for this and ran it through a
Python 2 to 3 converter. I added this to the project.
4. I managed to convert enough code in feedparser.py and sgmllib.py to get
the Activity to run without generating diagnostic messages. I have no idea
if it is actually working.

Thoughts?

James Simmons
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