On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:01 PM, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote: .. >> >> A Google-based search field is reasonable. An analogue to "perldl> >> help foo" is not. For one, we'd need to have PDL running on the server >> which may not even be possible. Then we'd have to make PDL produce >> help content without the shell, and produce its output in HTML. Ugh. > > I've been thinking about this myself, since I wrote that functionality into > piddlebot a month or two ago. It's not hard to search the docs database, but > you'd have to have the docs database and modules available to a perl script > on the web server. Of course, you only get the docs database and modules by > installing PDL on said server, and I imagine that is not feasible. > ..
Why so convoluted? Anyone (you, me, Daniel...), anyone who has installed PDL on their own computer already has all the docs installed under mandir (wherever that is for PDL). In fact, the docs are there in the PDL source package. Also, when PDL is installed, it also generates HTML documentation (although, I must confess, I don't know where it sticks them). All that is needed is to copy the files to the web server. Granted, at some point the docs and the PDL version are going to get out of sync, but 90%+ docs will remain pertinent for a long time to come. At some point, the docs directory can be refreshed, but one certainly doesn't need to install PDL to get PDL docs. Now, all that is left is to glue the search box and the docs directory together with your perl script. Also, with regards to the auto-suggest, the easiest auto-suggest would be for the various functions. PDL has a finite number, albeit a lot, of functions/methods in its various packages. Even a flat-file db (or a DBM) would be able to power a useful auto-suggest. -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
