Re: (Potential) Request for UI- and feature-freeze break for Yelp

[Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>]

Hi,

<culling all parties that probably aren't interested again>

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 13:02 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Matthew Paul Thomas">
> 
> > Trying to stay away from the bikeshed, but: This function isn't for
> > searching forums in particular, it's for searching the Web-based help for
> > the distribution (help.ubuntu.com for Ubuntu, novell.com/support for Sled,
> > fedora.redhat.com/docs for Fedora, and so on). So including "forums" in
> > the URL is misleading.
> 
> Right, this specification was never made clear. An implementation was
> demanded (at very short notice!), without sufficient details for making the
> choices necessary for hosting an API. I have tried fairly hard to boil it
> down to something future-proof, but I can't do that without a decent spec of
> the problem (and no, I'm not willing to just whack any old thing up and see
> what breaks in future).

Again, sorry if I've come over as harsh.  I'm not going to go over the
history.  Lets put it down to a miscommunication and leave it.  I'm not
being facetious, I just don't want it descending into mud-slinging. 

> 
> So: I need you guys to give me a solid spec on what the API will do, and
> where you see it going in future. Ideally on a wiki page or in a single
> email (rather than individual dribs and drabs). We should take creation of
> web APIs as seriously as we do platform APIs.

>From my view (and on GNOME's side): Our online documentation is (and
should be) a copy of what's available on the computer, through Yelp.  If
this isn't the case, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere and
needs to be fixed.

>From this, if someone searches through yelp and can't find what they're
looking for, they see the link at the bottom of the search page "Try
repeating the search online at...".  If we redirect the search to our
online documentation, they're still not going to find the answers (as
they'd be effectively searching the same stuff).  Instead, we redirect
them to the gnomesupport forums.  Here, they (hopefully) find the
information from other posts.  If not, they can start their own thread.

For the near future, the redirect script should take the search terms
and redirect to the forums.  In the future (medium term), we may like to
alter the script in various ways:
1. Allow different languages to redirect to different places
This would be done by adding a new {query} to the yelp side of things,
giving the language code.  The redirect script would then sniff that and
if present and in a code it knows, redirect to the stated forum.  If it
isn't present, or the code is unknown, it redirects to the default
gnomesupport forum.

2. Log the search requests
This is script-side only.  It would allow us to monitor what people are
searching for (anonymously) and improve our searching algorithm and
documentation.  It would also allow us to track whether we're doing a
good job of improving the docs.

3. Keep up with changes
IF gnomesupport changes their search URL scheme, the script would need
updated.  IF gnomesupport disappeared, we'd need to find somewhere else
to redirect to.  Neither of these looks likely to happen in the near
future.

That is all I can see we would want to do to the script.

>From the distro side, I can see that distro's might want to redirect to
their online help centre.  That, however, has nothing to do with GNOME's
default redirect script.  As I said, all the docs on our site (i.e.
lib.g.o) should be a mirror of what is available on the default GNOME
desktop.  (Default) Yelp can and should redirect to forums.  IMO, the
redirect script in place now is fine.

(/me hopes and preys this is the end of the discussion)

Don