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Re: rpm meta-database



On Fri, 1 May 1998, Gaal Yahas wrote:

> On Fri, May 01, 1998 at 01:18:30PM +0000, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> > No, but if you save them in a document marked up as HTML and place it in
> What's wrong with a flat text file!? it's not as if there's too much

There's nothing wrong with flat text, except Netscape and Lynx which I use
to browse my system choke on text files that contain tabular data and are
not marked up (by justifying it into a large mess). I like to READ my
files, you know ;)

Also, mixing file locations from about 12 CDs tends to make stuff LARGE.
The uncompressed index hits 20 MB easily, with 4-5 lines per file on
the average. Also, the nature of the HTML file makes it possible to fix
broken CDs (with Rock Ridge extensions broken) by making the (full,
corrected) filename in the list a HREF to the broken file on the disk. 

> perl, thank you very much; but I still think having it locally as html
> is just an overkill. I might do a fancy cgi with updates and spiffy stuff
> if I have time, but unless it's made public, what's the point?

1. I don't like Perl because I can do in shell scripts and C programs
things that Perl is just barely capable of (with 30-40 modules).
2. It is not spiffy, it's just a dumb list but the browser does not mess
it up.
3. Local html served by NCSA httpd or dhttpd or my own srvr is very fast
and has a small footprint in memory.

Locally, I mean on one of the machines I run at home ;). Since most of
these are used for experiments and crash often I keep the manpages and all
docs on one of them which is taboo. The easiest way to browse all this is
by HTML of course. I have exported the entire /usr/src, /usr/doc, and
/usr/man (via CGI) with NCSA HTTPD (because I run it from inetd), and
it's way cool. Gone are the times when I used to telnet into the machine
for scraps of information.

I'm still looking for something that can index or read PDF files and Word
documents.

Other:

The latest faux pas in Linux was made by a guy who wrote an embedded Linux
HOWTO, and posted it to comp.arch.embedded (or .homebuilt or such), in,
guess what, Word 6 format ;) He got flamed so badly in place that he has
got the longest message thread in the group (besides a Y2K discussion).

Peter