nix-assistant

motivation

yesterday i was watching the New Horizons Mission Update - July 13, 2015 [1] and learned many new things. among them how most nix related projects got their names ;-)

in this posting i want to share some of mine nix related documentation news which is:

• nixos options search [2] is now available for offline use
• wiki.nixos.org [3] also!

the story

starting back at the zidanca sprint [4] i had the idea of making the wiki available offline and since i was very much into qt and thus using ‘qt assistant’ i wanted it to be as cool as the qt docs.

so here are the first results:

downloads

you can download these files:

• https://nixcloud.io/nix-assistant/options.qch
• https://nixcloud.io/nix-assistant/wiki.qch

download it:

% wget https://nixcloud.io/nix-assistant/options.qch
% wget https://nixcloud.io/nix-assistant/wiki.qch

then install:

% nix-env -i qt-full

and import the documentation:

% assistant -register options.qch 
% assistant -register wiki.qch 

finally, launch assistant:

% assistant

conclusion

how i did it:

since i don’t have access to the mysql dumps i was forced to use phantomjs/casperjs to query the data. turns out that casperjs and in particular javascript is a very nice combination for scraping webpages!

you can find the source code at github [5].

issues:

• license for the wiki is currently unknown?! ;P
• images and some article types are not included in the wiki yet
• toolchain not published yet, update: see [5]
• not completely automated yet
• make ‘qt assistant’ a standalone download or consider ‘zealdocs’ [6]

i hope to get most of these things fixed soon!

hf,
qknight

links

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSGTbS3xuQ
• [2] http://nixos.org/nixos/options.html
• [3] https://nixos.org/wiki/Main_Page
• [4] https://nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_Zidanca_sprint_2013
• [5] https://github.com/qknight/wiki.nixos.org-scraper
• [6] http://zealdocs.org/