Subject: Re: linux-doc: Missing man page references
From: "Michael K. Johnson" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 1995 18:05:11 -0500

Keith Owens writes:
>The idea of (optionally) building a complete database of manual pages
>is attractive if it can be done in reasonable time, i.e. if it is
>practical.  One possibility is to use mkid, a textual database store
>and lookup system.  I find mkid useful for scanning and indexing text
>of all kinds, both source and documentation.  At the moment it builds
>its database from scratch each time, the NEWS file says that an
>incremental update is in the works.  The c.o.l.announce entry was -

Glimpse does all this, and the latest version (3.0b) has incremental
update capability.  It is also well tested, since it is the basis of
the Harvest text retrieval system.  It also provides a few other things:
one is a glimpse "server", which can keep the index constantly in
memory to satisfy requests very quickly.  Another is different sizes
of index (the larger the faster); the default is the smallest size.

It's at http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/

You can also find it at ftp://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/glimpse/

michaelkjohnson