PREFACE: Thank you for the incredible answer :) On Wednesday 28 October 2009 07:37:33 am Will Stephenson wrote:
The KDE 4 desktop search[*] is shipped with 11.2 but is disabled by default (I heard faint complaints about a certain dog here on this list).
Say it isn't so!
b) It would be possible to search for documentation anywhere: for example krunner, or directly from applications.
Good application help and reference is the most informative and most underutilized resource going -- generally. Take OpenOffice for example, by 2.3.x the help was mature and was so detailed that it allowed a user to make use of even the most subtle features of writer, calc, etc.. without relying on much else. In contrast, the current kde4 help system is primarily google or kde.org as something as basic as distribution lists in kmail are difficult or impossible to find. If there are any resources on the kde side of the house that can be focused on the help system, it would be a much better use of the resources than say "improving widgets" at the moment.
c) more powerful help queries would be possible. I couldn't come up with a killer example OTOMH but for example, there are currently embedded keywords in our docbook help that could be searched separately to the full indexed text of the file
I'll have to figure out how to do that. Because there are a lot of things in kde4 that I try to find basic information on (like whether a feature exists, and if so, what's it called and how do I use it?) and searching help or browsing through /usr/share/doc/packages usually turns up nothing more than a generic README. Examples: /usr/share/doc/packages/kuiviewer: COPYING COPYING.DOC README /usr/share/doc/packages/kuser: COPYING COPYING.DOC README /usr/share/doc/packages/kwalletmanager: AUTHORS COPYING COPYING.DOC README
Will
[*] What is the KDE 4 desktop search? Nepowhatsit? Stroppi?
Internally it's 2 technologies. Nepomuk is the general purpose metadata service in KDE 4. File indexing is one kind of metadata. Beagle took the opposite approach and concentrated on file content with a sprinkling of other metadata.
Strigi refers to a set of high performance metadata extraction libraries, and is the Latin name for the owl family.
A Nepomuk process controls the indexing, using the Strigi libraries. These extract file-type specific metadata and Nepomuk stores it in its databases. Since Nepomuk is modular, this means file indexing can be disabled independently of the Nepomuk semantic service. At its simplest, this provides desktop-wide tagging and rating of files, but can also describe non-file data like recently visited URLs, locations you've used your computer, people who mailed you a file, etc. In 11.2 this is all hidden behind the cryptic nepomuksearch:/ ioslave, so we disabled it by default, but expect to see it becoming more and more useful.
I'm sure somebody has a vision of how it will ultimately come together, but if you could toss in a suggestion or two about the help system, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for your detailed response. I understand where we are now :-) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org