Problems with Vaults of Parnassus

[Rainy]

On Wed, 06 Jun 2001 23:12:21 GMT, Wolfgang Lipp <castor at snafu.de> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 

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