Opened 13 years ago
Closed 12 years ago
#564 closed defect (fixed)
Documentation is very poor
| Reported by: | Vitaliy Filippov | Owned by: | Olly Betts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | |
| Component: | Documentation | Version: | 1.2.6 |
| Severity: | normal | Keywords: | |
| Cc: | Blocked By: | ||
| Blocking: | Operating System: | All |
Description
It's too bad that Xapian documentation is very poor and unstructured. Xapian is a good search engine, but most of the users don't even know about it.
There are pieces of information in different places and you have to dig through them to find out what you need. I'm now experimenting with Xapian and had to look into code to understand several issues (code is very readable though).
For example, the idea of implementing fields using prefixes looks very odd to all new users familiar with other search engines, for example, Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/) or Lucene, and it's not described in Xapian manual, it's only mentioned on Omega page.
perldocs for Perl bindings are also poor.
Another thought is that you IMHO should move all documentation to one format and one place, rather HTML or Wiki (Wiki is probably better). I (as the author of MediaWiki distribution "For Intra.net" (http://wiki.4intra.net)), personally, recommend MediaWiki, but I think it's up to you and Trac's wiki will also serve OK.
As a result of the doc sprint, we now have a the documentation pulled into a coherent guide:
http://getting-started-with-xapian.readthedocs.org/