Show HN: Brök – Find broken links in text documents

https://github.com/smallhadroncollider/brok#brök

by shcollider • 6 years ago

93 39 6 years ago

This is cool although for practical purposes, I think most people who need such a tool will not be using Haskell. It is tempting me to add Haskell to my CI just because it looks so nice and easy to use.

nh22• 6 years ago

Why would you have to "add Haskell to your CI" to run the tool?

You also don't have to install C++ and Rust compilers to be able to run Firefox, or a Haskell compiler to run Pandoc.

michaelmior6• 6 years ago

Very true although the latest binary is only released for macOS.

blondin• 6 years ago

interesting. is haskell that big? don't they have a docker image you can pull in?

i know python and node and other languages have small images you can get for the CI situation you describe.

yesenadam• 6 years ago

I started installing haskell a lil while ago with macports but I got as far as

bash$ port rdeps ghc

The following ports are dependencies of ghc @8.8.3_0:

gnupg2 pkgconfig libiconv gperf gettext ncurses zlib xz bzip2 libassuan libgpg-error pth libksba libgcrypt readline gnutls autoconf automake libtool xattr unzip gtk-doc glib2 libxml2 icu libffi pcre libedit libxslt perl5.28 db48 gdbm docbook-xml xmlcatmgr docbook-xml-4.1.2 docbook-xml-4.2 docbook-xml-4.3 docbook-xml-4.4 docbook-xml-4.5 docbook-xml-5.0 docbook-xsl-nons itstool gawk py27-libxml2 python27 expat openssl sqlite3 python_select python2_select python38 python3_select py38-anytree py38-setuptools py38-six py38-pytest py38-setuptools_scm py38-py py38-packaging py38-attrs py38-hypothesis py38-sortedcontainers py38-zopeinterface py38-parsing py38-more-itertools py38-pluggy py38-wcwidth pytest_select py38-nose nosetests_select py38-lxml py38-pygments pygments_select py38-mock clang-9.0 cmake libcxx curl libidn2 libunistring perl5 texinfo help2man p5.28-locale-gettext libpsl curl-ca-bundle libarchive lzo2 lz4 zstd libuv libomp llvm-9.0 xar llvm_select clang_select ld64 ld64-latest libmacho-headers libtapi gmp libtasn1 p11-kit nettle libusb-compat libusb npth pinentry-mac openldap tcp_wrappers cyrus-sasl2 kerberos5 libcomerr coreutils alex stack happy HsColour python37 py37-sphinx py37-docutils py37-roman py37-setuptools py37-alabaster py37-babel py37-tz py37-pytest py37-setuptools_scm py37-py py37-packaging py37-attrs py37-hypothesis py37-sortedcontainers py37-six py37-zopeinterface py37-parsing py37-more-itertools py37-pluggy py37-importlib-metadata py37-zipp py37-toml py37-wcwidth py37-freezegun py37-dateutil py37-pytest-cov py37-coverage py37-mock py37-imagesize py37-jinja2 py37-markupsafe py37-pygments py37-requests py37-chardet py37-idna py37-urllib3 py37-certifi py37-snowballstemmer sphinx_select py37-sphinxcontrib-applehelp py37-sphinxcontrib-devhelp py37-sphinxcontrib-htmlhelp py37-sphinxcontrib-jsmath py37-sphinxcontrib-serializinghtml py37-sphinxcontrib-qthelp texlive texlive-basic texlive-common texlive-bin fontconfig freetype libpng ossp-uuid libzzip cairo libpixman xrender xorg-libX11 xorg-xtrans xorg-xorgproto xorg-util-macros xorg-libXdmcp xorg-libXau xorg-libxcb xorg-xcb-proto xorg-libpthread-stubs xorg-libXext xorg-xcb-util graphite2 fonttools py37-unicodedata2 py37-brotli harfbuzz harfbuzz-icu libpaper mpfr potrace xorg-libXp xpm xorg-libXt xorg-libsm xorg-libice xorg-libXaw groff ghostscript jbig2dec jpeg libidn tiff lcms2 psutils netpbm jasper jbigkit libnetpbm xorg-libXmu xorg-libXi xorg-libXfixes texlive-bin-extra latexmk texlive-latex detex latexdiff p5.28-algorithm-diff pdfjam texlive-latex-recommended pgf dvipng gd2 webp giflib t1lib dvisvgm asciidoc fop brotli woff2 texlive-context texlive-metapost texlive-xetex texlive-plain-generic texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-math-science texlive-fontutils lcdf-typetools ps2eps t1utils texlive-lang-czechslovak texlive-lang-english texlive-lang-european texlive-lang-french texlive-lang-german texlive-lang-italian texlive-lang-polish texlive-lang-portuguese texlive-lang-spanish texlive-luatex texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra texlive-pictures

And decided to give it a miss.

rnhmjoj• 6 years ago

GHC is notoriously large. The compiler itself is around 1.5GB (this includes documentation, static and dynamic libraries).

To get an idea of the size of the bare-minimum system that's required to develop in language x, you can look at the cumulative sizes of the Nix package closures. This is what I get for ghc, nodejs and python3:

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.ghc | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    3.35463 GB

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.nodejs | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    1.05813 GB

    λ nix path-info -rS nixpkgs.python3 | awk '{s+=$2}END{print s/1073741824 " GB"}'
    0.485017 GB

nick_meister• 6 years ago

Pardon my ignorance about compilers, Haskell, and programming in general (I have no background in CS, please don't roast me :), but cannot the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) produce a (binary executable) package that could run in Linux/Windows without having Haskell?

nh22• 6 years ago

Yes, and the announcement even says:

"Binaries for Mac and Linux are available."

jamessb• 6 years ago

This is cool although for practical purposes, I think most people who need such a tool will not be using Haskell

Many people writing documents as text files use Pandoc, which is one of the most popular tools written in Haskell.

michaelmior6• 6 years ago

I didn't realize Pandoc was written in Haskell :)

robenkleene4• 6 years ago

Interesting, when I saw the headline, I immediately thought it was something else that I want: I keep all of my notes as plain-text Markdown files, and I use Wiki-style links between them, like `[Another File](another-file.md)`. One of the pitfalls of this approach is that if you change a filename, then all the links referencing that file will then be broken. So I'd love a tool like this that can be used to clean up a directory full of these documents.

xorcist• 6 years ago

Given that your file names are pretty unique words, does it really need to be harder than a simple search-and-replace?

sed -i 's/(another-file\.md)/(yet-another-file.md)/g' *.md

Moru• 6 years ago

It could be automatic. I also do everything as .md and have been contemplating this for a while. Maybe I should get it done finaly.

apostacy3• 6 years ago

I used to do that, but I switched to wiki-style [[links]] instead. But I can go back and forth with a regex.

There's some really interesting discussion about interlinked notes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658

robenkleene4• 6 years ago

Love to hear any more commentary about the pros and cons of this approach? I assume the main reasoning is that it’s easier to make a link?

The nice thing about the `[File](file.md)` method is that it’s markdown native, e.g., you can follow them in GitHub, if you have a way to render file URLs HTML, you’re links will just work in the browser too, and many txt editors can follow them by default.

JuanTono• 6 years ago

Really cool! This could be implemented in wikipedia to detect and fix broken links easier.

unhammer• 6 years ago

The name is a pun on "broke"? (I first thought it was Swedish for "brøk" (fraction/ratio), but it turns out Swedes don't say "brök" but "bråk", which just means "noise" in Norwegian&Danish. But that's way too convoluted a pun, even for Haskell).

toxik2• 6 years ago

Bråk means fight in Swedish in the noun sense!

tapland2• 6 years ago

Or "division" in a mathematical sense

_Microft• 6 years ago

I think it might be just a heavy metal umlaut [0], meant to look cool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

shcollider2• 6 years ago

Yes, bad pun on "broke"

alexpapworth• 6 years ago

Amazing! I made a shitty version[0] of this last year. I guess great minds think alike, but greater minds execute better!

[0] https://github.com/alexpapworth/detect-broken-links

jwilk• 6 years ago

If you're not into Haskell, you might want to give my Python project a try:

https://github.com/jwilk/urlycue

nesarkvechnep• 6 years ago

Why would anyone care if `brok` is implemented in Haskell?

Show HN: Brök – Find broken links in text documents

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