Subject: search engines

From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 18:07:51 -0400

[ I sent this to Lars, but then thought perhaps the whole list might
  be interested.  Sorry for the duplicate mail, Lars! ]

> Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > I don't think we have free software packaged to do full text searches.
> > We have glimpse and ferret, neither of which is free. There's something
> > that is part of freeWais, but I haven't looked at it yet. Someone with
> > the time should find and package one. It should be usable from the
> > command line so that it can easily be integrated into Debiandoc.
> 
> It'd be nice to have something like altavista, that could generate a
> page containing a (heirarchical) list of the references found.

I've been thinking about what you said regarding search engines for
"debiandoc".  As I understand it, this is to be a debian package, is it
not?

Debian has been a great help in my company and we'd like to give something
back, so how about this...

We'll make a version of Ferret that you can include and redistribute with
your package completely freely.  It will be, however, a query-only version.
We'd then licence to you (free, of course) a full version from which you
could generate the index that went in the package.

What do you think of this idea?

An alternative would be to have your package depend on the evaluation
version of ferret that exists in the distribution, but I don't think this
is a good idea.

                                        Brian
                               ( [email-masked] )

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    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.

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From: Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 09:54:11 +0300

>   be interested.  Sorry for the duplicate mail, Lars! ]

In the same vein, I append my response.

> What do you think of this idea?

Thanks for the offer, but alas, it's not workable -- the index needs to be
rebuilt for each system separately, since the set of documents is different
on each system, and Debiandoc is supposed to support locally installed
documentation as well.

I will, however, make debiandoc and ferret work together, if it isn't
too much work. From my experiments with glimpse a long time ago, it
can index arbitrary directories or files, and outputs a list of filenames
as the result of the search. If ferret can do that, then I'll add support
for it in debiandoc.

-- 
Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]> <http://www.iki.fi/liw/>
Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.