From owner-freebsd-doc Fri Nov 9 6: 1:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from blackhelicopters.org (geburah.blackhelicopters.org [209.69.178.18]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1D00737B41A for ; Fri, 9 Nov 2001 06:01:43 -0800 (PST) Received: (from mwlucas@localhost) by blackhelicopters.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA13313; Fri, 9 Nov 2001 09:01:41 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from mwlucas) Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 09:01:41 -0500 From: Michael Lucas To: "Gary W. Swearingen" Cc: doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: finding stuff in documentation Message-ID: <20011109090141.A13258@blackhelicopters.org> References: <20011108142314.A10189@blackhelicopters.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i In-Reply-To: ; from swear@blarg.net on Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 02:11:37PM -0800 Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org My personal favorite tool is "grep -ir" on /usr/doc. But those of us who track the doc tree are a fairly small group of FreeBSD users. You can even look things up by error codes in Microsoft's documentation, AIX's documentation, why not FreeBSD? (Mind you, in those cases you have to take an unintelligible error string, call vendor support, and have them look it up in their proprietary index, but it's the same general idea.) I was a librarian for several years, and the first place you go to research anything is an index. The search engine is great for problems documented in the mailing list archive, but we can do better for the formal project documentation. On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 02:11:37PM -0800, Gary W. Swearingen wrote: > Michael Lucas writes: > > > A decent index would also help us manage the content of the Handbook > > and FAQ. > > I doubt it'd help me, preferring to search for strings or regular > expressions within the almost-always-loaded text files in XEmacs > buffers. (A all-documentation index in the form of a smart search tool, > along the lines of The Meta Project http://cantaforda.com/Meta/, would > be a different matter.) > > > + linkend="archsw-readin-failed-error">this > > + FAQ. > > I'd rather see "this FAQ" be the link (or even "FAQ") than "this". -- Michael Lucas mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org http://www.blackhelicopters.org/~mwlucas/ Big Scary Daemons: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/Big_Scary_Daemons To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message