I'm one of those people who prints out every draft that they need to
read for each IETF. This usually takes me an afternoon of going
through each agenda manually getting a copy of each draft,
printing and stapling. To make matters worse, there's a fine
timing issue because the agendas change up until the very last
minute. So, if you want a head start you print early but then
you need to go back later to get a complete list. This often ends
up with missing drafts or printing out duplicate copies.
This time I got tired of it and wrote myself a little
tool
to do the job for me.
The job is mostly simple:
- Suck down the agenda for each WG.
- Scrape through the agenda looking for anything that might be
a draft name (i.e., matches
draft-[a-z0-9\.-]+-\d\d). - Fetch each draft from the ID repository (assuming you don't have it)
- Print out the drafts that were successfully retrieved.
- Remember which drafts were printed so you don't print them again.
I did add one bonus feature: I print out a burst/header page for each WG containing the WG name and a checklist of the drafts. This makes for easier sorting (not all drafts have the WG name in the name) and gives you a convenient list of the drafts. Now if I just had some tool to staple them together..
