Subject: Re: [htdig3-dev] target audience
From: Tom Metro (tmetro@vl.com)
Date: Fri Dec 03 1999 - 15:55:30 PST
Geoff Hutchison <ghutchis@wso.williams.edu> writes:
> >It is also possible that you might just want to
> >concede that Ht://Dig isn't going to be optimized for speed.
>
> Eh? I don't think many people would consider ht://Dig particularly
> easy to administer.
Ease of administration was just an attribute picked as an example. The
point was, define your target audience and optimize for that.
> It would certainly help to have a more user-friendly admin
> interface.
As noted previously, I thought installation and setup was fairly easy,
but would be greatly improved by having a "quick start" document that
carried the user from build through cron entries. And the addition of
some reporting or logging facilities so the operator could get a feel
for how well the indexing worked.
> Besides, if you're looking for ease of installation or
> administration, you're probably going to use some of the various
> websites out there that will do it for you.
You mean sites that host the search engine? Yes, true, so obviously
Ht://Dig's audience isn't looking for that level of ease of
installation/adim. For whatever reason, they've determined that the
added capability that a locally hosted search engine is worth the
investment.
> Capable? We have reports of users satisfied with performance on
> 500,000+ URLs.
> Scalable? Needs work.
But that's my point. Maybe making a tool that is scalable over such a
broad range isn't a good use of resources. The number of users that
need to index > 500,000 URLs is probably miniscule. Perhaps they'd be
better served by other tools. Of course if efficiency and scalability
occurs as a side effect of general code improvements, then wonderful,
but is it worth adding a lot of complication, as for example, a
threaded version might? It may not best serve Ht://Dig's core
audience.
This was just a thought. I'm new to Ht://Dig, so I don't know whether
it fits with its philosophy.
-Tom
-- Tom Metro Venture Logic tmetro@vl.com Newton, MA, USA------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the htdig3-dev mailing list, send a message to htdig3-dev-unsubscribe@htdig.org You will receive a message to confirm this.
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