Re: docs chunking status

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 02:38:57PM +0200, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> fre 2002-04-12 klockan 14.28 skrev John Fleck:
> 
> > So do either of you have more specific suggestions for the changes
> > necessary to gnome2-db2html to make this all work?
> 
> What is needed is some sort of internal cache in gnome2-db2html so that
> it doesn't have to go through all the work it does whenever you change
> section. We probably want this anyway, so that when changing document it
> doesn't have to re-read the stylesheets again (which it currently does).
> 
> IMHO, this can be done in three way.
> 
> 1) Put it in Yelp directly, so that it runs in the same process as yelp 
>    and thus never quits during one session.
> 
> 2) Have it in a library together with the man2html and info2html which I
>    can use from within Yelp instead of having to call external programs.
> 
> 3) Have it run as a daemon which you call from yelp.
> 
> I think that 2) is probably the best solution. This will probably
> improve load-time of documents quite a bit but will require me to move
> the gnome-vfs module-code into Yelp (which isn't a big problem).
> 
> The thing I want to know is how much of the db2html-procedure that can
> be cached so that it doesn't have to be redone for every section, that
> is, how much time will the second call to get a section cost?
> 

The KDE solution has been to parse the entire document once and hold
all the chunks in memory, then hand them off to the help browser when
requested. I'm not smart enough to know whether the right place to do
this is Yelp or a libraryized gnome2-db2html, though it seems to me
that if we made gnome2-db2html into a library and did it that way, we
would retain the ability for other browsers to use it.

The KDE approach essentially creates a single document in memory with
delimiters setting apart each chunk (this is done with their
stylesheet). This has the added advantage that
you can create the document at build time and have what amounts too a
pre-built cache, and you also can save it as a file the first time the
user looks at the help file for your cache.

Cheers,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h) jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com

"You don't want to die with the music still in you."
 - John Gardner