Re: About the Gnome Help browser

[Marc Ewing <marc redhat com>]

Olof Oberg <mill@pedgr571.sn.umu.se> writes:
> > 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 c
> ould
> > >  > support the following syntaxes (transparent to the application) at lea
> st:
> > >  > 	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. 

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

You could do something like that, but the "://" indicates a remote
host *always* (that's my understanding anyway).  So, yes, we could
allow "man://helpserver.foo.com/ls" but it would have to be translated
(according to some configuration) to rewrite as something like
"http://helpserver.foo.com/man.pl?ls" or whatever.  That is, the
"man:" at the front does not indicate any transport mechanism, it
just indicates that I'm type in a shortcut to a man page and the
help browser need to rewrite it to a full proper URL.

> 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.

We can just use http or ftp for that.  I'm hoping actually that
it'll be user (system administrator) configurable, as in the
example I just gave above.  Simple rewrite rules for these
"URL shortcuts" would allow this.

Does this make sense?

-Marc