[Gtk-sharp-list] Re: [Mono-devel-list] A larger patch for the monodoc-browser

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello Philip,

   [ Gtk# TreeModel experts: there is some help I need here]

   Thanks a lot for your patch submission, and I want to apologize for
my slow reply time.  Here are some of my comments:

> - I added a few menu-items
>   (I've already send a patch with these changes a few hours ago)
> 
> 	File->Exit
> 	Edit->Copy
> 	Edit->Select All
> 	View->Expand All
> 	View->Collapse All
> 	Help->About

What is the difference between "Select all" and "Copy"?

I am not sure I like the idea of having "View/Expand All", that is
likely a very time consuming process.  I would be ok with "View/Expand
all children" though.

> - I finished the "Index"-tabpage: If you type in "System" and enter then
>   the listbox will be filled with all the classes in the namespace
>   "System". Clicking on such an item will take you to it's
>   documentation. Note: You can use Regular Expressions here.

I think that this is really a "Search" feature.  

That being said, my long term plans are to use a text indexing engine
that would index the contents, so the search is performed on that,
rather than being performed on the captions which is not as useful.  So
this would just be a temporary solution.

As for the Index: I have checked in my code for creating an index, but
it is not completed yet.  The new indexing code principle is that each
provider would "populate" the table of contents with information that
people would look for.   Once the data is populated, a compact index is
written out.  Then this is used to present a list that the user can
browser, or can be used to dynamically search the index. 

Very much like the Microsoft help  browser for the .NET framework.

Now, the shortcomings (and you are free to get involved here):

	* The providers are not populating all the data they should,
	  currently they are only doing this for the proof-of-concept,
	  bootstrap phase.

	* There is no compression of text.  And there is quite a lot of
	  redundancy, so index files are very large.
	
	* I have not written the widget to display this information.

	  Since the index might contain millions of rows, it is not
	  possible to load the information in memory, nor use the
	  standard "Gtk.TreeModel" stores, because it would just consume
	  too much memory to just display.

	  Few options:

		* Create a wrapper that would allow C# code to implement
	  	  the tree models with managed code, without having
		  to "populate" them.

		* Create a new list-widget (not hard to do, but would be
	  	  a duplication of effort) for browsing it.

So could you rework your patch a bit to cope with this?

You did a great job.  I wonder if I can get you interested on taking on
some of the other pieces missing in Monodoc (there is a "NOTES" file in
monodoc/browser with various pending items).

Miguel.