Re: About the Gnome Help browser

[Olof Oberg <mill pedgr571 sn umu se>]

> 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.

I took a look at the rfc1738 and eventually came up with this. 

; man://man(1)
; man://1/man
; man://localhost/man(1)
; man://localhost/1/man
; man://rtfm.mit.edu/man(1)
; man://rtfm.mit.edu/1/man
lowalpha       = "a" | "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "f" | "g" | "h" |
                 "i" | "j" | "k" | "l" | "m" | "n" | "o" | "p" |
                 "q" | "r" | "s" | "t" | "u" | "v" | "w" | "x" |
                 "y" | "z"
hialpha        = "A" | "B" | "C" | "D" | "E" | "F" | "G" | "H" | "I" |
                 "J" | "K" | "L" | "M" | "N" | "O" | "P" | "Q" | "R" |
                 "S" | "T" | "U" | "V" | "W" | "X" | "Y" | "Z"
alpha          = lowalpha | hialpha
digit          = "0" | "1" | "2" | "3" | "4" | "5" | "6" | "7" |
                 "8" | "9"
safe           = "$" | "-" | "_" | "." | "+"
extra          = "!" | "*" | "'" | "(" | ")" | ","
escape         = "%" hex hex
unreserved     = alpha | digit | safe | extra
uchar          = unreserved | escape

; well here is 'my' part
mpath           = [ digit "/" *[ uchar ] | *[ uchar ] "(" digit ")" ]
manurl          = "man://" [ host | "localhost" ] [ mpath ]

(think this should be correct)

Only problem is, as mentioned above, the protocol. Would be 
good if there could be a uniform way to access man or info 
pages over the network. To have a designated 'help-computer' 
could save disk space and ease management for sysadmins. So 
maybe having a stripped down http protocol for retrieval, but 
then how would you get people to use it. And do they really 
want to run yet another daemon? Well just some food for thought.

 /mill

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