spoon-discuss: Proposal Automation

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have just completed an script that automatically writes and submits 
Proposals, so we are now all superfluous. (maniacal laughter)

Just kidding. Really, I have a semi-functional list filter ready to test. 
>From now on, any Proposal sent to the business list having the appropriate 
formatting will be caught by the filter, which will then churn out a file 
which can be fed to the database interface script to poke the Proposal into 
the database. For now, I'll still have to do the feeding manually, but 
that's by choice, as I'd like to be certain the filter works correctly 
before turning it loose on the database.

So, the filter will recognize the following tags, the form of which will be 
familiar to anyone who knows LaTeX (it turns out to be easier to parse this 
sort of tag than html-esque tags):

\begin{proposal}

This signals the start of a Proposal.

\end{proposal}

I'm sure you can guess what this one does.

\title{Foo}

Replace "Foo" with whatever you want the title to be. 

\number{nnn}

Replace nnn with the Proposal number that your new Proposal is revising.

Some usage notes:

--The \title and \number tags for a Proposal may appear anywhere between 
its \begin and \end tags, even in the middle of other words, like this:

\begin{proposal}

This is a test Pro\title{Test Proposal}posal.

\end{proposal}

--You can include multiple Proposals in a single message.

--Backslashes need only be guarded if they would cause an ambiguity. For 
example:

1. This is a sentence with \s in it.
2. This is a sentence with \begin{proposal} in it.

1 is just fine as is. 2, however, will tell the filter that a Proposal 
starts in the middle of the sentence, which is probably not what you want. 
So, 2 should be written as:

2'. This is a sentence with \\begin{proposal} in it.

That clears up the ambiguity. If this makes no sense, just ignore it, as 
you'll probably never need to type something like this anyway.

--Note that I'm still required to recognize Proposals not submitted this 
way, and I will continue to do so as long as the Rules require me to. 
However, I'd really appreciate it if everyone would follow this convention, 
as it will save me a lot of work.

-- 
J.