Re: [Groff] The permuted index from Hell

[Clarke Echols]

When I first had responsibility for HP's manpages, I was completely
appalled at the uselessness of the permuted index that was taken
from the NAME line.  For example, on cp(1), the line was:

   cp, mv, ln - copy, move, or link files

I solved the problem by embedding comments in each file such as
.\" toc cp(1)<tab>copy file, files, or directory subtrees
.\" toc mv(1)<tab>move or rename file or files or directory
.\" index rename file<tab>mv(1)
.\" index create zero-length file<tab>touch(1)
etc.

as appropriate for each file.  I used grep to pull the comments from
the files, ran them through sed, sort, etc. and produced a masterful
and highly useful index with lots of goodies.

What started that was my early experiences with unix where I went
to the permuted index and looked for "rename a file".  I was not
plesed when the only thing I could find is the rename(2) system call.

It's called USABILITY.  AT&T's original approach may have been
"neat" but it wasn't valuable as a useful tool...

Clarke


Larry Kollar wrote:
> So I got this bright idea to build a permuted index for the MIBs we 
> support in our products at work. It might be helpful for customers who 
> are trying to figure out which MIB object would have the information 
> they're looking for.
>
> So I grabbed the textutils package and built it, checking over the 
> documentation several times, installing an "eign" file in the right 
> place, and adding the #define to the ptx source code so it will *find* 
> the ignore list. Then once I fed some sample data in, I figured out 
> which options I needed (settling on "ptx -frRO -F '...'"), then wrote an 
> awk script to pull what I wanted out of the MIB files.
>
> After a bit of debugging, and writing a Q&D ".xx" macro to format the 
> index, I was ready to see what I had. What I had was 253 pages of 
> 8-point text, formatted properly.
>
> Back to the drawing board, I guess.
>
> --
> Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
> Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
> http://unixtext.org/
>
>
>
>
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