Best strategy for broken, archived grammars? Fork? Fixup? Schema?

[si14]

Hey folks!

I'm (very slowly) working on a rust version of textmate-based highlighting, and your collection of grammars is hugely helpful. However, since my parser is a bit more strict than vscode's, I found a few grammars that have issues in them. Here's an example from xml.json:

        {
          "begin": "<%--",
          "captures": {
            "0": {
              "name": "punctuation.definition.comment.xml"
            },
            "end": "--%>",
            "name": "comment.block.xml"
          }
        },

It's obviously a typo, end and name should be one level up.

information_for_contributors (taken from https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/extensions/xml/syntaxes/xml.tmLanguage.json I presume) suggests upstreaming fixes, but the original grammar https://github.com/atom/language-xml/blob/master/grammars/xml.cson is now archived, so it can't be fixed.

I found similar issues in wikitext.json, stata.json, and racket.json. Additionally, jinja.json uses arrays for captures, which is a bit funny. I get why it works in JS, but stronger typed languages fail on that.

It'd be lovely to fix those grammars, so what would be your preferred strategy?

• should I submit a fix in vscode for them?
• should I fork archived grammars, introduce fixes, and propose new upstream here (and maybe in vscode)?
• should I submit a PR with "fixups" for those grammars (maybe using patch)?
• would you like to have some form of validation for grammars, maybe a JSON schema?

[slevithan]

You've offered multiple good suggestions, and the project maintainer/owner can better speak to what they'd prefer to see. But note that there's an existing system for patching grammars at build-time. Ctrl+F for "patch" in sources-grammars.ts. I'm guessing this will be the easiest solution.

[RedCMD]

VSCode does do the odd patch from time to time
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/extensions/html/build/update-grammar.mjs

I wouldn't really bother forking unless you wish to maintain the grammar (adding features/fix bugs etc)
must of those syntactic issues are pretty shallow

I've got a schema
there's also VSCode's old schema