Problems with Vaults of Parnassus

[Wolfgang Lipp]

readers, 

I am having a few problems with the vaults of parnassus 
recently. the vaults are undisputedly *the* one-stop station 
whenever you look for a python module. however, there 
are three problems i can see:
	
	the current categorization is somehow less than
	satisfying. i do not want to delve into an analysis
	here; if nobody feels this way, ignore the point. 
	if someone agrees, perhaps this can be made 
	more concrete. 

	more seriously, the search engine does not work
	correctly. i have experienced this several times,
	and i am sure it is not a mistake i make, it is a
	malfunction. please go try for yourselves: on
	http://www.vex.net/parnassus/apyllo.py/751771926.353274583
	you'll find jim fulton's extension classes (with 
	a sadly broken link, but that's more of dc's 
	problem). the author's name is in the field 
	titled 'owner'. now go to the search form below
	and try to find 'jim', 'fulton', 'jim fulton', lowercase,
	uppercase. restrict the search to 'any text', 'owners',
	do what you will -- "No Parnassus records matching 
	your search criteria were found." is the sole answer.
	then, try 'extensionclass' -- same, no results. only
	thing that does yield results is 'extension class' (13 
	records) and 'extension class' (87 records). it must
	be admitted that 'extensionclass' is not in the text
	of the page, but it's in the url. be that as it may, 
	the name of the owner does appear and is not 
	found. 

	next, you say ok, those extensionclasses must be 
	somewhere, so you follow the download link to 
	fetch 
	http://www.vex.net/parnassus/download/Parnassus-Condensed-by-Category.html
	which is sadly way behind time, and there, indeed!
	you find a lot of hits for 'extension' (using the browser's 
	find-on-page function) plus one for 'extensionclass' (this 
	time, the url is, of course, found because it is included in 
	the listing). however, names of owners/authers do *not*
	appear in the listing. 

in all, if i was asked 'please find out whether a guy named jim
fulton, who works for digital creations, has made available 
a module called extensionclass', and i go searching, i sure
would have to answer in the negative, which is not correct. 
obviously, we have a few problems that intertwine here, 
and some of them are not within the vault's responsibility
(although it may be hard to communicate to executives 
why links are not checked for validity and listings are not
updated nightly).

does anyone have similar experiences? where is the 
problem? 


-wolf