Re: Xchat logs backend, indexing and file name assocation.

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

Hi Wade!

Glad to hear that you are hacking on an X-Chat backend.  I have been
wanting one of these for a while, so it's great that it is getting done!

Right now I am not online, so I can't view your code; my comments here
are therefore being made blind.

On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 22:21, Wade Mealing wrote:
> Indexing:
> 
> Stating the obvious, i am indexing the xchat logfiles using dashboards
> indexing code. In the current source, the logfiles are indexed each time
> dashboard starts.  This can take anywhere from 10-60 seconds depending
> on how much you are logging.

I'm glad you're using the indexer; one of the real deficiencies of our
indexer right now is that it doesn't support incremental updates
efficiently, so that if a file changes a little bit -- especially if the
only changes are appended data -- then you don't end up having to
reindex the entire file.  Right now you have to reindex the entire file,
which is too bad... :-\

Polling the .log file or reindexing is probably your only choice right
now (I presume that you are checking the mtime on the file to make sure
that it has changed before you reindex?).  One possible improvement on
polling would be to reindex every N time units, only if you know that
the file has changed, because X-Chat has sent you a cluepacket.

> I have another version of the code, which does indexing at regular
> intervals.  Again, while indexing the indexing db is unavailable.  Does
> anyone know a way around this ?

I think the indexer needs to be fixed.  I don't personally understand
the problems that well.  Maybe Jimmy can fill us in.

> File name association:
> 
> At the time of writing, the default gnome 2.4 has no association for
> files ending in the .log extension.  As this is using gnomes mimetypes
> should this be left for the user to decide ?  Is there anything that 
> could be done to say "open in favourite text editor" ?

In your match, do this:

	<a href="exec: name-of-viewer {0}">match text</a>

See backend-manpages.cs for an example.

Best,
Nat