Re: [PATCH] Being crazy: -Tindex

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 01:22:11PM +0100, Kristaps Dzonsons wrote:
> >>I'm accustomed to being able to search for documentation quickly
> >>and am not satisfied with apropos, whatis, and man -K.
> >
> >Neither am I. I have a GSoC project idea for this on NetBSD's idea
> >list: http://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/gsoc_2011/apropos/
> 
> Hi Joerg,
> 
> Unfortunately, I'll have to know more about my student status before
> committing to GSoC... hmm...

It wasn't specifically directed at you :) In fact, I would hope that
this is something that can attract attention from students.

> My thought with whatis, by the way, was to add an option like
> -Tascii -Owhatis to display only name(section) - description, then
> have whatis crawl the -Tindex database for matching Nm's (you could
> have whatis hang from man and query MAN_PATH, but whatis searches
> for `Nm', not file names).

My problem is that this is still quite limited. I want to really
obsolete apropos(1) and thereby address the core issues. I hope I am not
the only person to have run into issues finding man pages, where Google
effectively pointed me back to the online man pages...

> In terms of apropos and full-text, I used db.h because it's standard
> on all BSDs.  SQL seems like overkill, as I'd think the usage to be
> primarily "look up name-exact, look up name-case-insensitive, look
> up name with misspellings".

I don't care much about the SQL part. The primary reason for using
SQLite is the FTS engine already available. As soon as you want to use
more than a single keyword, it gets messy very soon. It's not something
to reinvent without good reason.

Joerg
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