[Omaha.pm] Gedcom.pm - searching for a path from person A to person X?

[Jay Hannah]

Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 12:52:27PM -0600, Jay Hannah wrote:
> First, my apologies for a delayed reply.

Not at all. You should some of the 2003 stuff in my Inbox. -grin-

>>I've got a little over 4000 people in my GEDCOM
>>
>>   http://jays.net/genealogy/
> 
> That's pretty impressive.  I wish I had that much information, but I
> spend too much time hacking  Gedcom.pm and too little time actually
> researching.

The trick there is to have cousins that already have 3950 people in their GEDCOMs. Merge 'em, and you're done! So easy! -grin-

> Im not sure whether anyone has written such a thing directly in Perl,
> but I do know of a lifelines script called "relation" that does (mostly)
> what you are after.  This script can be translated into Perl using
> lines2perl which is a part of the Gedcom.pm release.

This LineLines?

   http://lifelines.sourceforge.net/

So LineLines is written in C, and comes with its own scripting language. And lines2perl converts samples of that scripting language to pure Perl (so I don't need anything other than Perl)? Did I get that right?

> I've reproduced the script below.  (It required a small change to
> lines2perl.)  You can run this directly, or use it to learn from.  The
> original script is after __END__.  The Perl is not wonderful, but I
> don't think it's too bad for an automatic translation.

Wow. That's awesome. Haven't played with the code yet, but I'll give it a stab.

> As an aside, lifelines has some really nice reports.  For the most part,
> lines2perl will translate them into Perl for you.  (There might be
> problems with some of the newer ones if they use new features I haven't
> implemented yet.)  See http://lifelines.sourceforge.net/ and
> ftp://ftp.cac.psu.edu/pub/genealogy/lines/reports/
> 
> Let me know if you run into any problems.

Ahh... There's "relation" on the FTP site. I get it...

>>                         If not, do you have any thoughts about how I 
>>might right it? Any interest in this being a plugin to Gedcom.pm?  
>>Gedcom::Search or something?
> 
> If you'd like to write some general method for this I'd be very happy to
> include it, either within the distribution or by providing some sort of
> plugin support.  If you do this, you might like to subscribe to the
> mailing list (details in the README) to keep us informed.

I've joined perl-gedcom at perl.org. I would have bugged them first, but I didn't see that in "perldoc Gedcom" or on your website.

Thanks for your help! I'll see what I can do w/ your magical "relation" translation. :)

j