Paul M. Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Wed, 12 Jan 2000 01:33:47 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> "Paul M. Foster" wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Kim Lester wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > ODE Summary Report #1
> > > =====================
> >
<snip>
> >
> > Is the plan to index things via some hierarchy, like the way man files are
> > laid out, or the way the Dewey Decimal System works? If so, then we much
> > exhaustively generate appropriate categories. Then the question is, can
> > our indexing technology be smart enough to figure out from the
> > documentation the categories into which the documentation falls? And what
> > if we further subdivide the content of a single man page? Does the indexer
> > do a good job with that as well? I'd love to see some suggestions on what
> > categories we should use.
>
> I don't feel that this is realistic. There have been attempts at this
> made with RPM, on rpmfind.net. If you list programs by category, it's
> impossible to find the program that you're looking for unless you put it
> in a specific category yourself.
>
Yes, but they divide up the man pages according to a plan, and when you
say "man foo" you get (mostly) what you want, regardless of what category
the program is in. Seems like a similar thing could be done here.
<snip>
>
> >
> > 1) We will work with existing doc formats, subset of which we must
> > define. (Vote: man, info, SGML, tex, text.)
>
> I don't understand what you're saying here.
>
Meaning that we would be able to use existing formats (as above) as the
input for our system, which would translate them into our native format,
and then could be displayed or whatever. But we have to decide what kind
of formats we're willing to accept as input.
<snip>
> >
> > If we want this thing to take forever, we should be obsessive about
> > obtaining everyone's agreement. Otherwise, let's just build a better
> > mousetrap, get most people to agree, and let the rest do as they like
> > (they'll probably come around anyway).
>
> This is true, but we should allow at least enough time for discussions
> to bring out all sides of an issue before the coders actually start work
> on it. This was done a LOT working with the GNOME mailer, Evolution.
Oh, agreed. I just don't want this to sit for months while every group
under the sun debates things.
Paul M. Foster
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