Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 03 Feb 1996 18:21:14 +1100
From:      Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org, doc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Any perl maniacs out there have a desire to improve our mail robot? 
Message-ID:  <199602030721.SAA18649@nemeton.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <6938.823303906@time.cdrom.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On Fri, 02 Feb 1996 15:31:46 -0800  "Jordan K. Hubbard" wrote:

> For those many folks still stuck with email as their only recourse, it
> seems like we could try a little harder to make this robot more useful!
> 
> Any takers?

"Bags I!"

> First on the list would be hot links to current docs, whereever those
> might be (I don't think we have ascii excerpts from the handbook on
> freefall - suggestions?), then perhaps some ability to search the
> archives in /usr/local/mail/archive and return messages matched (up to
> some max threshold) by date/subject/pattern/mailing list.

Links are easy.  Searching is easy too, although too much data will
beat up the machine unless we pre-index.  Should this hook into the
search engine on the Web server?

> If someone wanted to get *really* fancy, they could even try to write
> an automated question parser which matches queries up with specially
> prepared FAQ entries..  Should be, what, 3 or 4 lines of PERL?  :-)

Yeah, right!  And we'll get Randal Schwartz to re-write the 3 or 4
lines to 1 line and make it a sendmail alias. :-)

A FAQ lookup by keyword is probably a good idea.

Giles

P.S. I also propose moving to perl5 -- any objections?



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199602030721.SAA18649>