[documancer-devel] Re: new Documancer caching code checked in

[Vaclav S. <vs...@fa...>]

Kevin & Masako Ollivier wrote:
> Hi Vaclav,
>
> On Jan 23, 2005, at 1:56 PM, Vaclav Slavik wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I checked in the long-promised generic caching code, any testing
> > would be most welcome. Aside from the big internal changes in how
> > the updates are carried, there are some UI improvements as well:
> >
> > * Updating book A's index no longer disables searching in book B.
> > * You can no longer attempt to search in a book without index.
> >   Previously, this would result in the UI blocking and waiting
> >   until the index is regenerated. Now, Documancer will warn you
> >   the the index is missing (see attached noindex.png) and will
> >   disable the search box -- it will be enabled again when
> >   indexing is done (remember: indexing happens in background,
> >   it's no longer triggered by user action!).
> > * If a book has index, you can search it even if the index is
> >   out of date. The index is generated in temporary directory
> >   and replaces old index when it's fully created, so as long as
> >   there is at least _some_ index, you can do (potentially
> > inexact) searches (see attached oldindex.png).
> > * Indexing of all books (i.e. even those not currently opened) is
> >   done in background when you're reading docs, meaning that
> >   there's a good change that Documancer will already be done
> >   generating the indexes when you'll need them.
>
> +4 :-)
>
> > Still missing:
> >
> > * Prioritization of the updater -- when you select a book in
> >   Documancer, the updater should stop doing whatever it is it's
> >   working on and update items owned by currently selected book
> >   as soon as possible.
>
> +1
>
> > * Autodetection of outdated books -- Documancer should check the
> >   HTML/info/man/whatever files and regenerate the index if they
> >   changed; currently, you have to do it manually.
>
> Can we make this feature an option for the moment, at least until
> Documancer's parser can handle more special cases? For example,=20
> sometimes EClasses have redirect pages, and those would stop the
> indexer. (As to why they do, it's a bit of a long story. ;-)
> Anyways, it's better for EClass books to use an outdated index than
> recreate the index by only indexing the redirect page and nothing
> else.

I don't understand what's the problem: as long as the index is=20
generated from the files (i.e. is newer than them), it's considered=20
up-to-date and not renegerated, so it shouldn't be a problem when=20
running from a CD, should it?

As for the "for the moment" part, that's already done because it's not=20
implemented yet ;-)

> Also, I should mention a couple features I'd like to add. One is
> support for searching metadata, and probably also generating
> metadata indexes. I'd like people to be able to look for documents
> produced by the United Nations, or publications from 1986, for
> example. Or browse an alphabetical list of all organizations that
> have documents in the book. EClass lets users specify this sort of
> metadata, and I think it would be good to allow Documancer users to
> perform more focused searches. For Documancer-generated indexes, we
> can probably use DublinCore metadata to get this metadata from HTML
> documents. I'm not sure if info or man pages specify this info in a=20
> standard way.

I don't understand how is this useful when searching in single=20
document (which is what Documancer does; as opposed to searching in=20
multiple documents). Documancer's search returns pages rather than=20
documents and it IMHO doesn't make sense to attach any metadata to=20
individual pages, let alone search for them. Am I missing something?

> Another feature - what I'd call "bookshelves". Right now,

I believe it's already in TODO ;)

> with books!) How I foresee things is that you select your
> "Bookshelf" from the drop-down list on the main page, then if you
> click on the "Browse" tab, you get a list of the books in that
> bookshelf inside the tree view. Eventually, with books like EClass
> books, you can also expand their contents in the browse tree view.
> If Documancer can't determine the contents, it will just show the
> root page of the book.

I like this UI to the bookshelfs...

Regards,
Vaclav

=2D-=20
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