11:47 <yaloki> howdy

11:47 <yaloki> writing a filter that renders PNGs from plain text files using plantuml

11:48 <yaloki> a bit at loss because the input file is text but the output is binary and nanoc assumes that a filter keeps the "type"

11:48 <yaloki> what works: just leave .pu (text) files as binary and produce the PNG, but then I can't use other text filters to preprocess the input file (in this case, I'd like to also use :erb)

11:49 <yaloki> an alternative would be to create new Item objects programatically for the resulting PNG files, and route the source .pu files into oblivion

12:57 <guardian> hello

12:57 <guardian> just read the ML, what's wrong about system() or ``? how is popen3 (much) better?

13:21 <suy> guardian: I assume because that reads all stdout/err into memory

15:33 <guardian> suy: I don't think I'm following you

15:35 <suy> guardian: neither do I without more context, I think. :)

15:35 <guardian> I'll read about system vs popen3 :)

15:38 <suy> guardian: I think that `cat large-file` will keep reading the stdout of the launched process, potentially blocking or exhausting memory. That's what I used to read.