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Date:      Fri, 9 Nov 2001 09:01:41 -0500
From:      Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org>
To:        "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net>
Cc:        doc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: finding stuff in documentation
Message-ID:  <20011109090141.A13258@blackhelicopters.org>
In-Reply-To: <j81yj89ali.yj8@localhost.localdomain>; from swear@blarg.net on Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 02:11:37PM -0800
References:  <20011108142314.A10189@blackhelicopters.org> <j81yj89ali.yj8@localhost.localdomain>

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My personal favorite tool is "grep -ir" on /usr/doc.  But those of us
who track the doc tree are a fairly small group of FreeBSD users.  You
can even look things up by error codes in Microsoft's documentation,
AIX's documentation, why not FreeBSD?  (Mind you, in those cases you
have to take an unintelligible error string, call vendor support, and
have them look it up in their proprietary index, but it's the same
general idea.)

I was a librarian for several years, and the first place you go to
research anything is an index.  The search engine is great for
problems documented in the mailing list archive, but we can do better
for the formal project documentation.

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 02:11:37PM -0800, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> writes:
> 
> > A decent index would also help us manage the content of the Handbook
> > and FAQ.
> 
> I doubt it'd help me, preferring to search for strings or regular
> expressions within the almost-always-loaded text files in XEmacs
> buffers.  (A all-documentation index in the form of a smart search tool,
> along the lines of The Meta Project http://cantaforda.com/Meta/, would
> be a different matter.)
> 
> > +             linkend="archsw-readin-failed-error">this</link>
> > +             FAQ.</para>
> 
> I'd rather see "this FAQ" be the link (or even "FAQ") than "this".

-- 
Michael Lucas
mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org
http://www.blackhelicopters.org/~mwlucas/
Big Scary Daemons: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/Big_Scary_Daemons

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