Hi, I forgot to mention a few things in my proposal and I'll also answer some questions I've been asked.
Missing things: * The install-time hit with Rarian is O(n). The install-time hit with scrollkeeper is O(1), however, for values of docs < ~ 1000, Rarian is quicker (by my timings and extrapolations). For most people, Rarian installing packages with help will be quicker. * Rarian uses the XDG_DATA_DIRS to determine the location of its meta-data files ($XDG_DATA_DIRS/help/*.document at the moment). By default this looks in /usr/share, /usr/local/share and $HOME/.share (XDG_DATA_HOME). jhbuild sets this when starting a session and most distro's won't install help outside the default. * There are no (zero, zip, none) translatable strings in Rarian, so translations shouldn't be an issue. The only strings are when something goes wrong parsing a file, in which case Rarian continues and spits out a warning to stderr. The user should never see these. * Bug reports should go into the google code bug-tracker [1]. I'll also request a bugzilla.gnome.org product for it for people who don't have / want a Google account but want to contribute. [2] Answers: Vincent Untz was found to say: > So, we don't have to change anything in any other modules for this to > work? I guess to get more testing, we could just change our jhbuild > moduleset (and wait for distros to use this). Elijah Newren wanted to know too: > You rock!! So am I understanding correctly that not only Rarian many > times cooler, but it's a drop in replacement with no work yet required > on anyone's part? If so, that's just unbelievably cool. :-) Yep. Nothing needs changed except jhbuild (s/scrollkeeper/Rarian/ almost does it). Indeed, Rarian is many times cooler (at least for the sort of weird person that is interested in documentation meta-data. All, erm, 1 of me). > > Also, are you still waiting for freedesktop.org admins to create some > accounts for you? I pretty much gave up. The bugs are still open [3], but the project has a Google Code page now. Would be nice to migrate to freedesktop at some point. BJörn Lindqvist did sayith: > Lacking documentation is a killer. As the author of the software it is > your responsibility to ensure that there is decent documentation for > the software you propose others to use. That point really cannot be > stressed enough. Rarian is probably much better than scrollkeeper, but > without documentation (which scrollkeeper has) it's a no go for me. Yes, I know. My bad. I'm actively working on documentation for the library and the supported meta-data files. It will be in the 0.5.2 release which will be out by the end of next week (I hope). BJörn Lindqvist continued: > Trollish, (but I'm honestly curious :)) why did you write it in C when > there are many other languages around more suitable to the job? The library is in C because C rocks (or to ensure compatibility and reduce any overhead)! The utilities are written in a mix of C, C++ and bash. C++ because I'm using tinyXML. The reason I didn't use anything else (trust me, I wanted to) was because I didn't want to introduce any new dependencies over scrollkeeper (I actually managed to cut the dependency list by 1 (libxml) and made another other optional (libxslt)). Don [1] http://code.google.com/p/rarian/issues/list [2] I just visited the tracker to find it's address and discovered 5 bugs already, three with patches :) I really should set up a mail relay when bugs arrive. [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10375 and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10376 _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
