The Foresight Linux Search Engine

If you’re a Foresight Linux user, there are many resources you have at your disposal for documentation.  First and foremost, you have the excellent guide shipped by default in Foresight accessible in the menu…but there are other resources you can search for a resolution to your problems.  The Foresight Wiki and Foresight Forum are other areas that can be searched as well as the Foresight Issue Tracking System (FITS).  Since Foresight is rPath Linux based, you also have the rPath mailing lists, the rPath wiki and rPath Issue Tracking System (rITS).  There is also Planet Conary and Planet Foresight.  With all of these resources, I found that I was jumping back and forth quite a bit while searching for information.  There isn’t anything wrong with that, but it isn’t efficient.

Taking this into consideration, last year I created a Foresight Linux search engine.  (You can bookmark this at http://bit.ly/foresight-search-engine because the Google url is quite long)

This search engine is Google powered and searches the following locations for you:

  1. http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/*
  2. http://foresightlinux.org/*
  3. http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/*
  4. http://issues.foresightlinux.org/*
  5. http://planet.foresightlinux.org/*
  6. http://planet.conary.com/*
  7. http://lists.rpath.com/*
  8. http://forum.foresightlinux.org

The interface is a single search blank that returns results from the aforementioned 8 sites.  Google indexes those domains and searches through them for you, making it much easier to find what you’re looking for.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can visit the link above.  On the front page of the search engine, you can get code to embed this search engine on any web page or add it to your google homepage as well.  Hopefully, this search eninge will come in handy for Foresight Linux users.

rPath Documentation Status Update

There are many changes on the horizon for rPath Documentation.

One of the things that team docs here has known for a while is that the rPath wiki is a fantastic tool to leverage for documentation. It’s quick. It’s easy. It allows engineers to contribute directly to the wiki. It allows community members to contribute to to the wiki.

We’ve also known for a while that this tool has a major caveat…and that is that versioned documentation is costly. For example, if we had say version 1.0 documentation of a project at wiki.rpath.com/v1/productname and version 2.0 came out, we’d have to maintain 2 separate documents with the same information in two different URI’s and 2 different name spaces. With each addition of namespace and project version, updates would be more costly and time consuming.

It’s also a bad thing that a user can search the wiki…and have the possibility of getting results from versions that they are not using…possibly information and behavior of products that no longer applies.

Continue reading “rPath Documentation Status Update”

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