On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:56:58 -0000 (GMT), "Gavin Henry" ghenry@suretecsystems.com said:

Dear all,

Has there been any discussion about this?

I thinking along the lines of htdig/swish-e that indexes all man pages/howto/README after every rpm is installed.

Something like a post entry in the spec file, or similar.

I haven't seen any on this list, but essentially this is a function of having a desktop search/indexing engine since there isn't a common format to this stuff. The next release of yelp (GNOME help browser) will display info and man pages, but can't index the random txt, html, pdf etc. that goes into /usr/share/doc/.

As a non-technical workaround I wrote a Docbook section for the Installation Guide explaining how to find the various sets of documentation in Fedora, which is currently in my offcuts folder. It's a bad situation for new users at the moment... --

Stuart Ellis s.ellis@fastmail.co.uk

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:39:32 -0000 (GMT), "Gavin Henry" ghenry@suretecsystems.com said:

<quote who="Stuart Ellis"> > > On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:56:58 -0000 (GMT), "Gavin Henry" > <ghenry@suretecsystems.com> said: >> Dear all, >> >> Has there been any discussion about this? >> >> I thinking along the lines of htdig/swish-e that indexes all man >> pages/howto/README after every rpm is installed. >> >> Something like a post entry in the spec file, or similar. > > I haven't seen any on this list, but essentially this is a function of > having a desktop search/indexing engine since there isn't a common > format to this stuff. The next release of yelp (GNOME help browser) > will display info and man pages, but can't index the random txt, html, > pdf etc. that goes into /usr/share/doc/.

We heavily use Swish-e (www.swish-e.org) for the fileservers we install. This can handle html, xhtml, txt, pdf and the like.

I've just looked at the page now, but it looks like a very useful bit of software.

Maybe something like this or a updatedocdb crontab, like slocate has and we just put the standard doc pathnames in a config file. The customize the web search page.

My understanding is that this is where things become quite technical and problematic. There is always a disjunct between what's actually on the disk and what is listed in the index. On portable computers it's harder to guarantee that batch indexing jobs will be completed regularly as well. Beagle and Spotlight use kernel hooks to update the index as changes occur. I suppose that RPM packages could run post-install scripts that update a document registry (kind of like you suggested) would be a relatively non-invasive way to implement something.

I definitely think that the default start page of the Web browser could be used very effectively by the docs project. The details of implementing an index might be a good question for fedora-devel.

--

Stuart Ellis s.ellis@fastmail.co.uk