[PD-dev] Work on "help" menu and help-patch searching spec

[B. Bogart]

Hi IX!

Hmmm, I figure specs are a good way to descibe a possible solution that
other devs can agree with before coding something that is deadly flawed.

Where does your grep search pick up "hanning-window"? From the name of
the array, from the comments? Indeed scanning for "keyword" would match
nothing since it would need to be added to the help files. This does
bring up the point, perhaps all comments in a patch could be used? We
would have to be more careful with our usage of them perhaps, to keep
things clear and consice.

Indeed there ought to be many text searching implimentations in tcl we
can use.

I think right now the help menu is NOT dynamic, only the submenus
(5.reference) are actually dyanamic. I should put a note in the wiki
that the menu should be dynamically generated... (though this would be
interesting when the -help files are centralized (in extra for example)
and things are organized into a hierarchy of function. Hence the note
about having the functional organization also included in the comments
of a standard help patch. In theory a developer could create an external
for which there is no catagory (unlikely I hope) and add thier own which
would dynamically be added to the help menu..

Thanks for the feedback! :)

B.

ix at replic.net wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 05:33:02PM -0400, B. Bogart wrote:
>
>>Hey all,
>>
>>I've added a few things to the wiki page:
>>
>>https://puredata.org/Members/bbogart/PDDocumentationStructure
>>
>>A crack at:
>>
>>* spec for the searching of help files.
>>* organization of pd "help" pull-down menu.
>>* functional catagories for PD externals/objects.
>>
>>Please take a look and contribute!
>
>
> looks pretty bureacratic in the sense that that was one of the things i hated about dot.coms... "specs" and such, a few comments:
>
> """
> The PD search system would go through all the -help patches in the helppath and generate a datafile that contains only the filename of the patch and the KEYWORD strings it contains.
> """
>
> im almost always able to find the answer i want by grep -ir whatever doc/ ..how about text-index all the non-binary files in doc/ with a stoplist for stuff like 'obj' 'msg' 'text' etc. for example a theres great patches containing the text 'hanning-window' but this certainly wouldnt have been picked up by only scanning for comments that begin with KEYWORD:. presumably theres more than a few text-indexers on the tcl wiki..
>
> re: the help browser, im not sure if i have the latest, but the "Help" menu is not putting in all the files in doc/, only the 1.x folders, so when 'scons install' copies externals/pmpd/help stuff to /doc/pmpd its not showing up in the menu. this should be an easy fix..
>
> C.
>
>
>>B.
>
>
>
>
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