There have been several stabs at such a project. The hard part is getting
people to contribute. It might work fairly well to copy the PHP manual
approach where people write/correct the real manual in CVS but each page
of the manual can have comments attached by anyone. So have each HOW-TO
owned by someone in charge of maintaining it (possibly via CVS?) and let
people add link, examples, and comments as desired. Then have the whole
thing searchable.
*^*^*^*
Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sungod robes
on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little
pickles at you? -- Real Genius
On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Vic wrote:
> Dude that would totally kick butt, a Linux howto search
> engine!
>
> On Thu, 05 Oct 2000, Mark Johnson wrote:
> > It seems there is a lot of personal knowledge locked up in a vast amount of
> > heads just here on this list. Significant trivia that just passes day in and
> > day out you can't really concentrate on all the postings because they don't
> > immediately concern you but later, like a year from now, you'll be like:
> > "hey, I'd like to change my X cursors." Then you have to either wade
> > through all your email or web archives searching for that final posting that
> > resolves the "how-to" problem. HOW-TOs are great; however, a little rought
> > to digest sometimes and but not always helpful.
> >
> > It seems like by leveraging perl or python and the rpmfind.net mechanism we
> > could build an infrastructure to capture all this know-how and create "guru"
> > utilities that formally gather and try all the diagnostics gleaned from
> > input from the collective consciouness within the Linux community and the
> > HOW-TOs and etc. This would probably be a monumental undertaking, but it
> > seems like that is what Linux is all about. Basically, if we could automate
> > (kind of like the ./configure process) the "did you check this and did you
> > try this" method of trouble shooting with some sort of feed back loop
> > something very innovative could be created. This would be taking the HOW-TO
> > one step further.
> >
> > I would really like to try to do something this. However, I have zero time
> > and zero experience with perl/python - but if anyone else thinks this is
> > interesting and would like to talk about how this might be done I'd like to
> > persue this a little more. Maybe there is something like this already...
>
