[ Linux Today reader Aaron Turner writes: ]
“This week has been a pretty important for the project as we
inch closer to our soft launch later this month. A number
improvements and important decisions have been made about the
underlying architecture. And for the first time, the Linux
Knowledge Base Org. has started releasing source code back to the
community.
The first of which is a patch to Ht://Dig 3.1.4 which allows web sites to
weed out duplicate documents in a search based upon the value of a
CGI parameter rather than the entire URL. To our knowledge, this
makes Ht://Dig the only GPL’d search engine to be able to support
this important function which is critical for highly categorized
database driven web sites.
The second is a port of Earl Hood’s man(1) to html Perl CGI
program (man.cgi) to mod_perl. Web administrators who use man.cgi
should see a significant increase in performance by switching to
the mod_perl version. Mr. Hood has agreed to include our port with
the next release of his man2html
package.
Both the htdig patch and mod_perl man to html converter are available on our web
site.
On the rest of the development front, there were numerous bugs
squashed with the search engine and many new graphics were drawn by
our gfx expert Marcelo Volmaro. We have also begun to start
importing content into the database in preperation for our soft
launch later this month so people will have something to play
with.
There was also a rather involved thread on the developer mail
list about how categorization information is stored in the
database. After analysis all members agreed to keep the current
method to allow for faster queries and prevent a rewrite of the
underlying object code (which would cause a delay in the launch of
the site).
Lastly there has been some personel changes here as well. One of
our developers has lost his Internet access and is unable to
continue development. Three others have found that the new year
brings new responsibilites at home and work, and are unable to
continue helping. The good news is that we have already started to
re-staff those vacated positions, and would like to publicly
welcome Chris Buzby to the project. We plan to start going back
through our archive of people interested in becoming a developer;
so if you’d like to help out, now is a great time to sign up if you have yet
to do so.”
Note: This and other articles can be found online at: http://www.linuxkb.org/news/.