From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 3 01:54:29 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id BAA16152 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 01:54:29 -0800 (PST) Received: from mailhub.aros.net (mailhub.aros.net [205.164.111.17]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id BAA16147 for ; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 01:54:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from terra.aros.net (terra.aros.net [205.164.111.10]) by mailhub.aros.net (8.6.12/Unknown) with ESMTP id JAA09936; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 09:54:52 GMT Received: (from angio@localhost) by terra.aros.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) id CAA19117; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 02:53:04 -0700 From: Dave Andersen Message-Id: <199602030953.CAA19117@terra.aros.net> Subject: Re: Any perl maniacs out there have a desire to improve our mail robot? To: giles@nemeton.com.au (Giles Lean) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 02:53:03 -0700 (MST) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, jhk@time.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: <199602030721.SAA18649@nemeton.com.au> from "Giles Lean" at Feb 3, 96 06:21:14 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Lo and behold, Giles Lean once said: > On Fri, 02 Feb 1996 15:31:46 -0800 "Jordan K. Hubbard" wrote: > > > For those many folks still stuck with email as their only recourse, it > > seems like we could try a little harder to make this robot more useful! > > > > Any takers? > > "Bags I!" Here's another taker for it. :-) > > First on the list would be hot links to current docs, whereever those > > might be (I don't think we have ascii excerpts from the handbook on > > freefall - suggestions?), then perhaps some ability to search the > > archives in /usr/local/mail/archive and return messages matched (up to > > some max threshold) by date/subject/pattern/mailing list. > > Links are easy. Searching is easy too, although too much data will > beat up the machine unless we pre-index. Should this hook into the > search engine on the Web server? Complete agreement on both counts. The pre-indexing isn't my area of specialty, though. We have a similar FAQ searching thing here, but we manually index the entries. > > If someone wanted to get *really* fancy, they could even try to write > > an automated question parser which matches queries up with specially > > prepared FAQ entries.. Should be, what, 3 or 4 lines of PERL? :-) > > Yeah, right! And we'll get Randal Schwartz to re-write the 3 or 4 > lines to 1 line and make it a sendmail alias. :-) > > A FAQ lookup by keyword is probably a good idea. Doing this in a general way isn't hard at all. If you have your indices, then all you do is strip the non-keywords out of the query, and then return a matching list as though they'd done a keyword search. As scary as it sounds, this actually isn't too bad to do in a couple of lines. I'd be more than pleased to do the english-language query parsing code. I actually have a neat little keyword-weighing idea floating around in my head that's half-coded already. > P.S. I also propose moving to perl5 -- any objections? *shrug* :) No opinion either way. -Dave Andersen -- angio@aros.net Complete virtual hosting and business-oriented system administration Internet services. (WWW, FTP, email) http://www.aros.net/ http://www.aros.net/about/virtual/ "There are only two industries that refer to thier customers as 'users'."