Re: About the Gnome Help browser

[Marc Ewing <marc redhat com>]

Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com> writes:
> J. Patrick Narkinsky writes:
>  > Is there anything in the source for VFS right now?  What are the
>  > status/plans on this?  For my tastes, I would like to see a VFS that could
>  > support the following syntaxes (transparent to the application) at least:
>  > 	Plain Old Filenames
>  > 	file:// -- Intuitively obvious to the Casual Observer
>  > 	ftp:// -- IOTTCO
>  > 	http:// -- IOTTCO
>  > 	config://
> 
> In theory, the thing before the colon is the transfer protocol.  You
> were fine up to http:.  And part of the transfer protocol is the
> document type.  And there's a mapping from the rightmost thing in the
> name into the document type, and another mapping from document type
> into helper application.
> 
> Yes, that means that info: and man: go against the grain.

I think that's true, but it does make things easier for the user.
Mike and I have been thinking along the lines of having "shortcuts"
like "man:ls" and "info:emacs" that are mapped to real URLs by
the help system.  For example, before *any* URL parsing happens,
the reference string is passed through something like
resolveShortcuts() that rewrites "man:ls" to "file:/usr/man/man1/ls.1"
based on its configuration and what it find on the filesystem.

-Marc