From: Mauricio Fernandez <mfp@...>
Date: 2006-11-11T08:12:06+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FastRI 0.1.1 (fast+smart ri docs searching): configurable search strategies

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 09:51:48PM +0900, Mikko Lehtonen wrote:
> Mauricio Fernandez wrote:
> >FastRI is an alternative to the ri command-line tool. It is *much* faster,
> >and also allows you to offer RI lookup services over DRb. FastRI is smarter
> >than ri, and can find classes anywhere in the hierarchy without specifying
> >the "full path". Its RubyGems support is better than ri's, and it knows
> >which gem a method/class definition came from.
> 
>   Excellent work. Works perfectly on my osx box.
>   Though, standard ri goes in to 'less' mode, I kinda got used to that.
>   Could it be possible that with some ~/.fastri configuration file I
>   could control if I want to pass it though 'less -R' ? (I'm assuming
>   not everyone wants it as a default.)

Sure, I'll implement it; it will probably be in 0.2.0. I always hated that
about ri though, so I think it'll default to pager-less mode ;-)

>   Now to alias ri to fri and somehow make it fallback if the server
>   isn't running =)

Jonas Pfenniger has done some work towards making fri launch the server (which
would run as a daemon). We're not there yet, but I've created a branch for
that at  http://eigenclass.org/repos/fastri/branch-daemon/  (hint: help appreciated :)

The bin/fastri-server you'll find there honors a -d option to run in the
background. This works already, using the 'daemons' gem, but it'd be best if
we could get rid of that dependency (a reasonable #daemonize should take a
dozen lines). bin/fri already tries to start the server when it cannot be
found, but this is not working yet (did I say that patches are appreciated? :).
Another pending issue is win32 compatibility: would it be possible to write
something equivalent to #daemonize without fork()?

-- 
Mauricio Fernandez  -   http://eigenclass.org   -  singular Ruby