From owner-freebsd-doc Fri Feb 2 23:25:53 1996 Return-Path: owner-doc Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id XAA04755 for doc-outgoing; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 23:25:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from yarrina.connect.com.au (yarrina.connect.com.au [192.189.54.17]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id XAA04746 Fri, 2 Feb 1996 23:25:28 -0800 (PST) Received: (from root@localhost) by yarrina.connect.com.au with UUCP id SAA04760 (8.6.12/IDA-1.6); Sat, 3 Feb 1996 18:23:49 +1100 Received: from localhost (giles@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nemeton.com.au (8.6.9/8.6.9) with SMTP id SAA18649; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 18:21:16 +1100 Message-Id: <199602030721.SAA18649@nemeton.com.au> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: hackers@freebsd.org, doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Any perl maniacs out there have a desire to improve our mail robot? In-reply-to: <6938.823303906@time.cdrom.com> Date: Sat, 03 Feb 1996 18:21:14 +1100 From: Giles Lean Sender: owner-doc@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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!" > 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? > 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. Giles P.S. I also propose moving to perl5 -- any objections?