1. Lunokhod

Lunokhod is a set of tools for parsing and compiling Surveyor[1] surveys.

2. Relationship to Surveyor

Surveyor does not provide access to a survey parse tree.  It also does not
expose any public hooks for compiling Surveyor surveys to any form except the
form expected by Surveyor's ActionView partials and compatible views.

Lunokhod is intended to be a more flexible design.  It provides tools to
generate an AST of a survey, perform some basic verifications on it (e.g.
checking for unresolvable or duplicate question references), and a compiler
that provides hooks for various backends.  A backend that prints out the parse
tree is provided as an example.  A backend that generates surveys as a Web page
with Javascript providing dependency evaluation logic is in progress[2].

Currently, Lunokhod is not at feature parity with Surveyor.  Nevertheless,
the present state of Lunokhod is still useful for survey tasks where
loading surveys into a Rails application is not necessary and/or
time-consuming.  Tasks that generate products based on survey structure (e.g.
generating or verifying translation files) often fall into this category.

3. Development and usage

You will need a Ruby 1.9 implementation; Lunokhod makes heavy use of Ruby
1.9 features, such as BasicObject and fibers.  Lunokhod is known to work
on Rubinius 2.0.0.rc1, JRuby 1.7.2, and Ruby 1.9.3.

The short version:

  $ bundle install
  $ ruby bin/lunokhod-driver [SURVEYOR SURVEY]

By default, lunokhod-driver will use the pretty-printer backend.  Read the
backend and AST to see how to use the tree visitor and what properties you can
access on each node.

Survey data may be piped in over standard input:

  $ cat kitchen_sink_survey.rb | bin/lunokhod-driver

Lunokhod does not have an automated test suite, but should.

4. Authorship and license

Lunokhod was written by David Yip at NUBIC[3] when he wanted a faster way
to work with Surveyor surveys.

Lunokhod is released under the MIT license.  See LICENSE for details.

5. Special thanks

How to destroy angels_, Kimbra, Little Boots, The Reign of Kindo, Dot Dot Dot.

[1]: https://github.com/NUBIC/surveyor
[2]: https://github.com/NUBIC/lunokhod-html
[3]: http://projects.nubic.northwestern.edu/

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