Enhancement: make it very easy to patch or use a non-patch method for the chkentry semantics tables

[xexyl]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched for existing issues and did not find anything like this

Describe the enhancement

A quite problematic issue with the semantic tables of chkentry is that if some new field has to be added or changed we have to jump through hoops to get chkentry(1) to not complain.

There have been numerous ideas we have floated but the most recent one (that both @lcn2 and I have thought of individually) is (as he wrote):

Instead a more descriptive file / file format should be used to indicate what needs to be changed. A reference JSON file can produce a table, but then something needs to modify that table to indicate that something might occur with a wider count range, for example.

Relevant images, screenshots or other files

No response

Relevant links

No response

Anything else?

Not yet.

[xexyl]

Although this is technically more of an enhancement I'm almost tempted to call it a 'bug': or at least a most annoying mis-feature. But of course it works well as long (as we don't have to modify anything) and something had to be done.

Of course working on this is post IOCCC28 but now we can at least discuss it (or not forget it as easily).

I do wonder if the jsemtblgen related code in jparse will have to change (I hope not) but I guess we'll see about that later on.

[lcn2]

We believe we have addressed all of the current questions that still need answering at this time. If we've missed something or something else needs to be clarified, please ask again.