Feature proposal: New, Standard Documentation System

[Les Mikesell]

Alphonse Van Assche wrote:
> Michael Cronenworth a écrit :
>> <cut>
>> 5. Global access
>>  You should be able to access any and all documentation for all 
>> software through a single window, be it X or console, without having 
>> to open the corresponding program.
>>
> 6.  a common way to find documentation about a given package. Here is 
> what I do when I need to read docs on a given package.
> 
> 1. rpm -ql pgkname
> if there is a man page and/or README and/or .html and/or ... - done!
> 2. yum list pkgname\*
> if there is sub-package named pkgname-doc - done!
> 3. rpm -qi pgkname
> if the URL tag point to upstream web site - open firefox find the 
> documentation page - done!
> 4. fedora-cvs pkgname - hoping that I know the language used and that 
> the code is nicely documented ;-) - done!
> 5. ??
> 
> I thing that we can do something to optimize the search of documentation 
> of a given package. To be honest I don't have any idea on the best way 
> to do that  - but I'm sure that we can do something better.

Yes, that approach is horrible and your example starts from the point of 
already knowing the package name.  We need a reasonable way for someone 
to find a new package (or any package they don't know about) that would 
perform some operation useful to them even if they don't have it 
installed yet.  Google, of course, knows everything, but even with a 
carefully crafted search will usually return a lot of irrelevant results 
related to other OS's or different version numbers.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com