-----
Building:
Easy with cabal-install, of course:
$ cabal install epub-metadata
Or the conventional way:
$ runhaskell Setup.hs configure
$ runhaskell Setup.hs build
$ runhaskell Setup.hs test
$ runhaskell Setup.hs haddock
$ runhaskell Setup.hs install
-----
Why was this done?
The motivation for this project grew out of my desire to take charge
of missing or incorrect ePub metadata in books I have purchased. I
started out using the Calibre open source tools for examining this
info. Limitations and incomplete implementation of those tools led
me here to build a more complete implementation in the programming
language that I love beyond all others.
-----
Why didn't I just use existing solutions?
- Calibre ebook-meta utility
I experienced various problems using this software, such as:
Incomplete and in some cases incorrect handling of tags that can
exist more than once, particularly when they are differentiated
using attributes according to the spec.
Unable to display many fields in the OPF Package Document metadata
specification. Unable to manipulate data that is represented as
attributes of tags in the OPF spec.
Astonishingly slow performance. The command-line tool in this
new Haskell project is more than 45 times faster at parsing
and displaying ePub metadata. I'm going to blame Python here for
Calibre's performance. This has had a big impact on projects where
I've been processing hundreds of ePubs in batch operations.
To be fair, an effort is being made in Calibre to work with both
ePub and Sony LRF book documents. That is going to naturally require
a lowest-common-denominator approach. My focus here was to work
with ePub only, and thoroughly support the OPF specification.
- epub on Hackage, EPUB E-Book construction support library
The focus of this project seems to be with building new documents,
not parsing existing files. And there is a specific attempt to
do more than the metadata, to gather up the content and other
metafiles that make up an ePub for creation.
Examining Codec.Ebook.OPF.Types, most of the metadata fields
from the OPF Package Document spec are missing or aren't modeled
thoroughly. I felt to contribute to this project, I would have
had to significantly rip up the types and redesign them.
At this time I felt it was a better solution for me to start fresh
with modelling these types and code to manipulate them. That said,
I would be very interested in combining the epub and epub-metadata
projects at some point in some way that makes sense.
-----
A word about the version numbering scheme:
4-part: major.minor.status.build
3-part: major.status.build
status:
0 alpha
1 beta
2 release candidate
3 release
examples:
1.3.0.2 v1.3 alpha build 2
1.2.1.0 v1.2 beta build 0
4.2.24 v4 release candidate build 24
2.10.3.5 v2.10 release build 5 (say they were bug fixes)
1.5.2.20090818 Can even use a date for build
v1.5 release candidate 2009-08-18 build
