[Vim-l] Template:Help - Alternatives

[John Beckett]

Even if we fix Template:Help to handle the weird characters that
can occur in Vim Help statements, I'm not happy that we would be
asking the sourceforge server to perform an enormous amount of
work for each link.

So my bluesky project is as follows:

1. Fix Template:Help as indicated in my "Template:Help - Simple
fixes" message.

2. Make a new Template:Help2 which takes two parameters. One for
display in the wiki (":help word"), the other to make the link
URL. The link would be like this:

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/motion.html#word

That is, the CGI script would not be used by Help2 (so Help2
would be very efficient).

A human editor would use Help, not Help2.

It may be possible to merge Help2 functionality into Help,
although I'm not sure the resulting elegance would be rewarding.

3. Make a client-side bot that would enumerate all VimTip pages,
and would change any Help links to Help2 format. The bot would
also check that the Help2 links are correct.

The check would apply the same logic as the CGI script. That is,
the help tag would be looked up in the vim70/doc/tags file, to
determine what page to use (motion.html above).

The bot could also convert any manually-constructed help links
to use the Help2 template. If I ever got that far, I would
probably actually construct a list of proposed edits for manual
review, then have another script apply the approved changes.

John