Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 11:03:20 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nclayton@lehman.com> To: chris@calldei.com Cc: Bill Fumerola <billf@chc-chimes.com>, doc@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Searching the Handbook (was Re: 'rtfm script') Message-ID: <19990707110320.U15628@lehman.com> In-Reply-To: <19990706165708.N4158@holly.dyndns.org>; from Chris Costello on Tue, Jul 06, 1999 at 04:57:08PM -0500 References: <Pine.HPP.3.96.990705100523.26110A-100000@hp9000.chc-chimes.com> <19990705141635.D97224@holly.dyndns.org> <19990706115526.Z15628@lehman.com> <19990706165708.N4158@holly.dyndns.org>
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On Tue, Jul 06, 1999 at 04:57:08PM -0500, Chris Costello wrote: > On Tue, Jul 6, 1999, Nik Clayton wrote: > > There are a couple of ways you could do it. Some of them more optimal > > than others. > > > > Executive summary: sgrep is probably your best choice now, which can > > can be found at <URL:http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~jjaakkol/sgrep.html>. > > But read on for more. > > > > The simplest way is to assume that the user has the plain text handbook > > installed, and do a simple grep through that for what you're looking for. > > See the FAQ parser. I want to be able to get meaningful > output for users. sgrep is also not viable because it's not in > the default system. Neither is rtfm(1) yet. Why not put them in ports, publicise them in the FAQ (OK, I realise that's a bit of a chicken/egg problem), lobby JKH to get it mentioned when installing the system, publicise it on the -newbie's list, and so on. I'd be surprised if this was something that was bought in to the system straight away -- pushing it through ports first seems like the natural way to do it. > > This is nice and easy to do, but doesn't take advantage of the additional > > smarts built in to the Handbook's native format. To do that requires some > > additional work. > > The handbook's native format won't be on the default system, > will it? They're all in HTML. You are in a maze of twist future plans, all different. I want to pull the Handbook (and other documentation, like the FAQ) out of the system as it currently stands. Instead, these should be packages, and available in a variety of different formats. At install time, sysinstall can present the user with a list of documentation options they want (including "All docs, all formats"), which will just pkg_add(1) the appropriate files. This doesn't work yet, because I haven't put the code to build the packages in to the doc/ Makefiles yet. If anyone wants to collabotate on this (or, better yet, present me with code that does it) please stand up and be counted. > > A smart searching mechanism will be able to use this additional semantic > > information to reject (or lower the rankings of) results that don't match > > what the user wanted. > > See above. I want rtfm(1) to remain viable on base installs. I'm not sure you do. You want rtfm(1) to remain viable on "newbie" installs. With a "base" install you can't even count on the manual pages being available. > > You could go the full SGML route. This would involve building an > > application that can parse the DocBook source of the Handbook (and other > > articles, and soon to be the FAQ) and allow the user to do their queries > > using this application. This is probably the most 'correct' route from > > a purist point of view, but is an awful lot of work. > > If the FAQ is to be DocBook-ified, will the SGML sources be > made availible via HTTP so rtfm(1) can still cleanly parse them > with a minor rewrite of the FAQ section? Yes, you could do it that way. I prefer the package approach, where you'll have packages like fdp-books-faq-html.tgz fdp-books-faq-sgml.tgz fdp-books-faq-html-split.tgz fdp-books-faq-xml.tgz fdp-books-faq-rtf.tgz and so on. Makes it vastly easier for tools like yours to say In order to have the greatest chance of finding what you want, you need to install the SGML sources for the FAQ. If you do not install these sources your searches will still work, but have a greater chance of returning false hits. The SGML source will take up roughly 500KB of disk space. Do you want to install the FAQ SGML source now? [Y]: As I say, for this to work we need to build packages from the doc/ repository -- I haven't had the time to investigate doing this yet. N -- --+==[ Systems Administrator, Year 2000 Test Lab, Lehman Brothers, Inc. ]==+-- --+==[ 1 Broadgate, London, EC2M 7HA 0171-601-0011 x5514 ]==+-- --+==[ Year 2000 Testing: It's about time. . . ]==+-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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