On Wed, 27 Mar 1996 16:25:40 -0800 Peter Rauch <[log in to unmask]> said: >Good. No explicit mention of Packages. Since a file might belong to >several Packages, I'm not ready to equate Package to directory contents. Packages are Phase 2 items. It's not clear that many people still want them. Nowadays packages are distributed as a ZIP file or equivalent. Packages are probably not very difficult to implement, but users do find the $PACKAGE confusing, and I can't wait for all the unix users to ask why it doesn't work when they type $PACKAGE like it says in the manuals :-) >I'm not sure what this means. Web-based menus/point and click/reply to >prompts/links is great stuff, but it's not database stuff. Much of what >a discussion list is --is text. So, the graphical stuff you refer to >must mean the interface and not graphical information content. People want to click on "Search the list archives", then they want a series of menus and forms allowing them to formulate their search. Then they want to click "Go!" and see the results as a series of links that each show a message. Something like that. What they don't want to do is type DATABASE SEARCH commands. Obviously you can provide forms that somehow submit a database job to LISTSERV, but that doesn't give you a reply on the web. Or you can use a local OS-dependent channel to LISTSERV to submit the database request and collect the results, then make links. That may not be fast due to LISTSERV being busy doing something else, it's limited to one concurrent search, but it's one way to do it. Another way is to have a search engine that can be used both by LISTSERV and in a web context. This is better but you either use separate indexes or have an interesting file locking issue with, if you're not careful, a potential for deadlocks. There are a number of hybrid approaches where LISTSERV keeps the indexes up to date and the web search engines can work in R/O mode. The whole web thing is going to be a big can of worms, of which we're going to get a foretaste when we release the archive browsing interface and everyone complains that it's not easy to install and why does my web server do this that way or require this or that and why do I have to configure so many paths and so on, can't there be a GUI that figures what my web server is, goes inside it and does everything for me? :-) >See my comments above. The "simpler" syntax you imply wouldn't buy much >more than echoing messages to a web/hypermail server and letting people >do their searching, such as it is, there (which is what some lists have >been doing, as I mentioned earlier). Actually, I was thinking in terms of something similar to the VMS SEARCH command, with a simple syntax, some context and an item number. If you want the whole posting, you order it from the item number. Boolean searches are not that hard to implement, the difficulty is in using indexing, which could be done later I suppose. Eric