[texdoc] texdoc --apropos

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Le 12/07/2010 23:40, Karl Berry a écrit :
> Jim Hefferon has specified keywords and categorizations now for all CTAN
> packages (!).

Impressive indeed. Is the categorization related to the "bytopic" page of the
catalogue? http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/bytopic.html

> So I was thinking that texdoc could acquire an --apropros
> option, which returns results based on keywords, in addition to the
> usual package and doc names.  Probably searching both Jim's list and the
> one-line summaries would be best.  Maybe even search descriptions, too.
> 
Yep, I had such a project very vaguely on my longer-term list (searching the
description). No doubt keywords and catergories will make it more effective.

(Vague projects I have about texdoc include making a GUI, which would also allow
to browse (as opposed to search) by category. I realise it looks very similar to
Jim's project for the future Ctan search interface, looking at your link below.)

> Jim's data is an enhanced version of the Catalogue, in XML, dumped
> nightly.  ftp://tug.ctan.org/ftpmaint/az/texcatalogue.xml
> Of course we wouldn't just dump in the whole thing, we'd have to write
> something to extract just the keywords in a form that is good for us,
> and transform package names (catalogue -> tl) where needed.  
> That shouldn't be hard.
> 
Sounds good. Does "we" mean "TL"? I mean, would the new information end up in
texlive.tlpdb or would the extraction tool be specific to texdoc?

> I don't think Jim's characterizations, nice as they are, are directly
> relevant for texdoc, since texdoc is about displaying documentation, not
> browsing directory trees.  You can view it all online at
> http://az.ctan.org/ (Jim's test site), though.
> 
Thanks for the link. I'll see in due time if the categories can be usefully used
as keywords too.

> Clearly this is future work, nothing to be done quickly or before the
> release.   (It came up at the conference.)  I'm sending it now just so
> it gets off my list and on to yours :).
> 
Thanks.

Manuel.