Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 08:27:01 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mailing list search interface Message-ID: <19980331082700.52299@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330104904.485V-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>; from John Fieber on Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 11:03:39AM -0500 References: <19980330164024.47510@iii.co.uk> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330104904.485V-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
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On Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 11:03:39AM -0500, John Fieber wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Mar 1998 nik@iii.co.uk wrote:
> > Are those survey results available online somewhere?
>
> No, I'll have to dig a bit and they are probably not in a very
> useful form. I'll have to fire up SPSS and generate some
> reports...
There was a survey? Somebody wants to know?
Please forgive this brief unlurk. I don't understand what you're doing but
it looks like a tremendous amount of effort. As a user I only see one
problem with the archive search: it doesn't find what I ask for. I'd even be
happier if it held only recent material and took a few minutes to present
the results as boring text files; if it found what I ask for it'd be worth
using. Now it doesn't, and it's not. Any improvement would be wonderful!
Example 1: Yesterday cron said "Cannot fork" which was meaningless, even
after looking at the cron-related man pages and trying apropos fork. So I
searched for "cannot and fork" and nothing came back. "cron and fork" came
up with a bunch of stuff which didn't relate to cron at all but mentioned
"fork" in entirely different contexts, often including the words "cannot
fork" which the previous search had failed to see. I became very frustrated,
started shutting things down, cron sprang to life and the penny dropped :-)
Example 2: In December I posted a question and received about 6 good replies,
which I promptly lost. In January I tried to search for them, over and over,
and could only find my original and one reply. Often searches reveal the
question but no answers can be found by any method, answers that I know have
been posted to -questions and contain the searched words.
How you want to make it work, how fast, how much disk space and memory, how
cool the method is, how it looks, matters more to you people than to me. To
be successful it needs to reliably do what users expect, and users need to
be made very clear about how to use it and what to expect from it. Forget
the latter and your efforts will never get the appreciation they obviously
deserve.
Thanks everyone for trying to work out solution!
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
find / -name "*.conf" |more
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