Re: Graphical help browser

[Søren Hauberg]

man, 24 11 2008 kl. 14:41 -0500, skrev John Swensen:
> I think I will probably stick with Xapian for now, since it does an  
> indexing of the HTML files and all of their content.

Yeah, the stuff I mentioned depends on a fairly intrusive changeset,
that I don't know if will be included. So, I wouldn't depend on it
either :-)

>   When searching  
> it also gives a percentage that tries to indicate how "good" of a  
> match it is.  For example, when I search for FFT, it comes up with the  
> FFT function as the top of the list, but FFT2 is second and a slew of  
> functions that involve the FFT (e.g. fftshift) and lists them in  
> according to their rank.
> 
> As far as I can tell from the help on lookfor(), it will probably  
> return all the same results as Xapian, but doesn't try to rank them in  
> any terms of relevance.  That being said, Xapian uses an algorithm  
> call the BM25 Weighting Scheme for ranking results.  See 
> http://xapian.org/docs/bm25.html

Sounds quite nice. Perhaps such an algorithm would be nice to have in
'lookfor' ? I don't really see the difference between searching in a
help browser, and using 'lookfor', so I'd prefer if these two functions
shared as much code as possible. This is, however, not trivial as the
help browser runs in a different thread.

Søren