Duh! am I missing something here?

From the plucker documentation …

Excluding Things!
Sometimes, the STAYONSITE and STAYBELOW attributes do not give enough selection ability to include only those things that you want included. Plucker looks for so called ‘exclusion lists’ in form of text files. It first loads the file exclusionlist.txt if it exists and then loads exclusionlist.txt in the directory you specified with the -p flag (again, only if it exists). The exclusionlist.txt files should be in a specific format, that is explained in the example file in this directory. Read that for more about this feature,

Incidentally STAYBELOW is exactly what you want !!!

Oh, I am not advocating Avantgo – it is just that the system works better than plucker right now given the conditions most people have to work with.

The finegrained controls you are talking about do not exist – a simple way to underline this: just click on the links at teh top of the Linux Today grab – and you will see that it has actually grabbed all the news *TWICE*! There is *nothing* you can do with plucker to avoid this.

What is basically missing is a control that supplements the <STAYONHOST> option – something like <STAYBELOWTHISURL&gt!

As said my reasons may be mine alone!!

You obviously haven’t installed Plucker under windows, niether have I ;-D Swati did it for me – Python and everything else in a single binary. Also for fine grain control you have to just define your home.html better … … look into the options.

BTW – you also have an option for using Perl instead of Python comming up …

Also I feel that having to go thru AvantGo servers is a un-necessary evil. tommorow if they shut down (and they are likely to) you are stuck.

Also again look at the footprint of Plucker and AvantGo…

Finally AvantGo will make sense for me when it successfully downloads the FreshMeat daily page without the FM guys having to do anything extra!!

Yes the single missing sorely feature is a parser for forms – which I am told is in the offing

Well, there are other options as well, such as iSilo, but they cannot beat the opensource nature of Plucker.

However, Plucker *does* have serious issues – not the least being the fact that you have to have python installed (even under windows!) to sync. That *sux*. With avantgo, and under Linux, I have a small C utility called malsync (also linked into my jpilot interface) that is all I require to sync avantgo. This may not sound like a big deal, but believe me – it is.

Also anotehr advantage of Avantgo is the fact that it downloads all the sites to avantgo servers first, creates the PDB, then sends you only the processed and compressed PDB. With plucker, you are basically polling every site yourself, gettnig down the stuff, compressing it, creating the PDB, then installing it on your palm. If you have tons of bandwidth, that is cool, but *not* when you are on dialup.

Plucker *still* does not have the finegrained formatting and link-following control that Avantgo has – using plucker, and no matter what yo-u set, you get way too much extra stuff down, while avantgo will get you *only* the stuff you actually wanted.

And finally – using Avantgo, I can do a modem sync (dialout using the Palm and a modem, and sync) – you can’t do that with Plucker at all. Period.

Plucker will make sense to me when I have a single binary as a sync tool and when the parsing system also stores the configuration file/info in the PDB generated, and if tehre is a mechanism in the palm app to use that config info to poll and collect the info directly (via a modem dialup, for example).