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Date:      Sun, 02 Jan 2000 17:04:27 -0000 (GMT)
From:      Andrew Boothman <andrew@ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org>
To:        ports@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        doc@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Automatic Documentation Index
Message-ID:  <XFMail.000102170427.andrew@ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org>

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Happy New Year, everyone!

With the world apparently still in one piece after the celebrations and the few
Y2K incidents, I guess we're back to our regular transmissions.

Since this message is going outside of -doc where it has been discussed
before, I'll offer up a full explanation of what's going on.

What is proposed is a system where all the documentation installed through the
ports system, or locally by a sysadmin, is collected together and indexed on
one HTML page; say /usr/local/share/doc/instdocs.html

This page is created by a perl script, docindex, which I envisage being run
either from a /etc/periodic/* or /etc/rc or both.

The script gets its information from +DOCS files contained within the
/var/db/pkg directory for each installed port. These files consist of three
fields, colon seperated. The first field being the name of the item of
documentation, the second being a filetype, and the third a full path to the
file.

For example, for Sharity Light :

FAQ:txt:/usr/local/share/doc/Sharity-Light/FAQ
README:txt:/usr/local/share/doc/Sharity-Light/README

In addition the local sysadmin can add similarly formatted files into, say,
/etc/docs.local/ that will also be read in and included in the index.

In order to help the ports maintainers, and others, create these DOCS files that
will be needed, there is a script called docsmaker. This script has a _very_
rough guess from the CONTENTS file of a port what might be documentation. But I
stress that the file which it creates will still need to be checked for files
that shouldn't be there, files that have been missed, and any other
stupid mistakes. :-)

Right, I think I'm just about finished. Apart from to say that current versions
of the scripts I've been talking about and example outputs from all this are
available from http://ukug.uk.freebsd.org/~andrew/docindex/

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments on how to proceed?

Many thanks!

---
Andrew Boothman <andrew@ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD UK User Group
http://ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org/~andrew/
http://ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org/


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