nix-assistant

23 jul 2015

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:

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

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