book-pipeline reaches for colophon and bibfetch on every book it repairs.
Shelling out would mean a process per book per tool across five thousand
books, and parsing back the JSON it is about to parse anyway.
bibfetch's fetch loop lived in main.rs, so binding it meant either
lifting it or writing a second one. A second implementation of 'which
register answers about this kind of identifier, and in what order' would
drift from the first, and the copy nobody runs from a terminal would
drift silently. It is now bibfetch::ask, and the command line calls it
too — verified by running the CLI before and after and diffing.
fetch_identifier releases the GIL around the request. It is the only
function here that opens a socket, and holding the interpreter for the
length of an HTTP call would stop every other thread in it.
bibfetch is optional and only the python feature turns it on: its HTTP
client does not build for wasm32, and an unconditional dependency would
have taken the JavaScript package down with it.
book-pipeline had its own copy of bibclean's author recovery. Bound on all
four surfaces so it can stop.
Checked against that Python over all 5,385 books in the library: 5,375
identical. On the other ten the Python had taken a translator, an illustrator
or the publisher off a copyright line — Sally-Ann Spencer for *The Dwarves*,
Thomas Nelson for a table of contents, C. S. Lewis for a book about Tolkien —
and bibclean either finds the real author in the Library of Congress block or
says nothing. Every one of the ten was read by hand.
Cuts a reference list into entries — at the note numbers where there are any,
at the layout where there are not — and reads each as far as its punctuation
allows. Fields that would not parse are named in `unsettled` rather than
guessed at, and `--prompt` asks a model about exactly those and no others.
Over 202 real reference sections from the corpus: 8,566 references, 95% with
a title, 82% with a year, 46% settling every field with no model involved.
A title is refused where the entry was never divided, so no record reports
its own text back as the work it cites.
`ibid.` is flagged and left alone — it points at a work, and the entry does
not say which. A rule of dashes is filled in, because the style defines it as
the author above.
chunkmd gains `note_starts` and `cites_something`: recognising a page of
notes and splitting one are the same knowledge, and two copies of that
pattern would drift.
funkpower