[Hepserver-devel] Re: [computer] Re: HEP Install

[Abe F. <ab...@fe...>]

On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 15:01, Curtis Seyfried wrote:
> Abe,
> Well it works. I did what you recommended and got "can't open file" and / 
> or "syntax error".  I eventually found that there was something wrong with 
> my Python 2.2 installation, so I reinstalled it and Twisted and then HEP 
> worked fine.

Cool, I'm glad it wasn't something on my end :-)

> I'm reading through the material you've written on HEP and the app looks 
> very interesting and promising. It'll take me a while of playing with it to 
> see how I can use it.
> 
> Can I create custom message sources ?  like pdf's from a specific Website 
> ?  Can I use HEP to index, or at least make sense of  some large 
> collections of HTML files - news articles,  documents, manuals, etc. - that 
> reside on my HD ?

A lot of the stuff I've been writing lately applies to Hep 0.4, which
hasn't been released yet.  I've done a lot of work on this new version,
and it basically works, but there are still a few features to add, and
bugs and issues with performance that I'm trying to iron out before I do
a release.  If you're interested in playing with the current code, it's
available through CVS - see the April archive on my website for details
on how to check out and run the code.

Creating custom message sources is certainly possible.  Are you thinking
of pulling the text from PDFs, or accessing the raw files?  At the
moment Hep is set up to handle text and html messages only.  I've
thought about adding support for images and other binary formats like
PDF someday, but that would definitely be a post-1.0 feature - in other
words, at least 6 months away.

As for using Hep to access documents on your hard drive - the problem
there is security implications.  From a technical standpoint, the only
thing preventing you from accessing on-disk files today is that I've
specifically disabled file:// Urls.  This is because some people run Hep
as a multi-user server, and they might not want everybody with a Hep
account to be able to arbitrarily access files on their Hep server's
disk.

I've been mulling the idea of creating an "Admin" account in Hep, that
could do things like set up connections to local files, and possibly
share them with other users.  That would probably give you what you want
without opening a big security hole.

Abe