Re: [documancer] Re: [documancer-users] a few bugs?

[<arn...@we...>]

Hi,

On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Vaclav Slavik wrote:
[...]
> I think it will be much better to use Unix domain sockets instead.
> It's more secure (if the permissions on socket are correct, only the
> user who runs documancer can access it) and it doesn't have the
> problem of finding the port number (the socket is in filesystem in
> predermined location, e.g. ~/.documancer/socket-remote-control).
> Win32 has some IPC mechanism that can be used instead (but it, sadly,
> isn't wrapper by wxPython). I'd like to eventually get rid of having
> to run HTTP server at all, for security reasons, but I need protocol
> handlers support in wxMozilla for that first (it's on the way).

Alright, that sounds much better, but I don't have any
experience in this direction ...
On my unix box a
  sock=socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  sock.bind("socket_file")
works fine. I don't know if this works under windows as well,
but I am skeptical (AF_*UNIX* ;-)...

> What I had in mind was a remote control server thread running in
> Documancer (as you did it) plus a small documancer-remote program,
> preferably written in C so that it has very little startup overhead
> and new instance of it can be launched for every request (so that
> you can simply bind a shortcut in Vim to launching specific
> documancer-remote command and get instant response). This small
> program would do no real job, it would only route requests to
> Documancer server (it wouldn't even have to parse its command line,
> it could send it as-is) and to launch Documancer if no instance is
> running yet.
>
> > Hmm, there is one missing bit in the above approach:
> > in some way we need to specify the book in which the search should
> > be done ...
> > (so maybe the external program needs to parse
> > ~/.documancer/config.ini, and pre-pend this to the search string
> > ?).
>
> Ideally you should be able to run, say, "documancer-remote
> --list-books", which would be sent to the real Documancer and its
> output would then go to stdout, w/o having to worry about parsing
> config.ini in the remote controller.

That sounds good. So the "search string" sent to documancer-remote
could look like
  <book_identifier_no_or_string>::<search_text>
((I think a textual identifier for the book would be better
than a numerical id (unless this is "uniquely" attached to
a book string) so that re-ordering/additions of books does
change the association)).

More generally, for searches (both remotely and within documancer)
a way to specify collection of books would be nice.
On the level of config.ini they could look like
  [Collection/Title_of_collection_1]
  title=Title of collection 1
  books=Book_1:Book_2:Book_3

On the GUI side one would need a small collection manager
(I think a wxCheckBox or wxCheckListBox would be nice for that).
If one removes a  book are removed one has to take care to remove
it  from any collection in which it shows up as well
(and possibly remove a collection if it contains no elements anymore).

Best,

Arnd