Re: search-linuxkb progress report

["Hugo Rabson" <hugo@www.nashville-now.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>
To: <linuxkb-list@seul.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 1999 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: search-linuxkb progress report


> On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Hugo Rabson wrote:
> I don't see any point in having a simple/advanced option.  simple/advanced
> is a UI issue, not a content issue.
True.

> Why are you retrieving the web page?  Aren't you building the UI yourself?
I'm used to writing programs which try to cope with web pages that change
w/o notice and whose POST fields are undocumented. However, if LinuxKB's
search engine's search fields aren't going to change for a while, I can put
them in a resource file installed with/by the code.

> I thought that this
> was going to be either a library or command like application (stdin/out)
> that allowed people developing other help applications to be able to send
> queries and retrieve results from the KB.
Agreed. I wanted the prog to retrieve the search engine's web page because I
wanted the prog to verify that the search fields were the same as before. If
the params won't change much for a while, okay. :) I'll work to the fields
listed on the web page but code them into the prog, rather than make the
prog deduce them from the web page each time it calls.

> now the stdin/out can already be done with lynx:
> lynx -(source|dump) http://www.linuxkb.org/search/remotesearch?cgiparams..
I'm not sure how big wget is; ditto curl. Almost everyone has wget, and it's
easy enough to include a 'requires' directive in the search-linuxkb RPM.