[Sugar-devel] Some thoughts on GetBooks activity

[James Cameron]

Yes, I remember some of this from when I last maintained those activities.

I felt that activities that depended on external APIs become difficult to maintain.  ;-)

On Mon, Mar 04, 2024 at 01:46:44PM -0600, James Simmons wrote:
> 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 [1]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: [2]https://www.feedbooks.com/catalog/
> public_domain
> 2. There are other ODPS servers, but not for public domain titles: [3]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 [4]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
> 
> References:
> 
> [1] https://www.feedbooks.com/
> [2] https://www.feedbooks.com/catalog/public_domain
> [3] http://opdshome.uo1.net/
> [4] http://feedparser.org/

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