Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Category Trees

[Ali A. <ali...@au...>]

* Dan Mueth (d-...@uc...) wrote at 01:48 on 25/11/00:
> 
> On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:
> 
> > How do we deal with category trees? I see category trees as generic
> > empty content lists.
> > 
> > These are the possibilities we discussed:
> > 
> > 1. Enforce a category tree and ignore all docs that don't fit into it.
> > 2. Enforce a tree and put all docs that don't fit into an Other section
> > of the Content List.
> > 3. Supply a tree (installed) and OMF files come with new categories,
> > extend the Categories in the Content List with them (don't modify the
> > category tree).
> > 4. Recommend a set of categories on the project web site, but don't
> > supply any tree. Build the content list(s) from whatever comes in the
> > OMF files.
> > 5. Don't recommend any categorization, but keep support in the OMF files
> > to specify categories. Extend the Content List with whatever comes in
> > the OMF files.
> > 
> > 1. and 5. are there for completeness only. I suppose nobody thinks they
> > would be a way to go.
> > 
> > So what do people think? Which is the best way to do it? Any other
> > ideas?
> 
> One more:
> 6) Support more than one of the above and allow the user/SA to decide
> which one method is employed in /etc/scrollkeeper.conf or
> $HOME/.scrollkeeperrc.
> 
> One other issue which should be discussed for options #1-#3 - What do we
> do with empty parts of the tree?  Do we show branches that don't have
> documents in them?  Or are these branches only created as they get
> populated?   I think the assumption right now is that empty branches
> exist and are passed to the browser.  (The browser could still potentially
> snip them out.)

I disagree. I do not think it is worth the complexity to actually let the user
choose.

You will also confuse system administrators, and desktop users who are not
sure of which setting to you use.

I prefer method 4. If somebody has a reason why we should NOT use number 4,
please say why? ;)
 
> And another issue: If we have a categories tree, should we allow the user
> to specify in the conf file which tree to use?  Presumably one may want to
> use an alternate tree, such as a subset of the recommended tree.  For
> example, a user might copy the default tree into
> $HOME/.scrollkeeper/categories.xml and then chop out the man and info
> page sections.

Well, I vote no category tree :P