[Question] - Is there a fully compiled version available?

[dsifford]

Hi there,

First of all: Thank god you exist. I'm a huge fan of Zeal and I think Zest is on track to be so much better. I read both of your posts on Medium and I figured I'd let you know that lots of people like me exist (someone without a medium and no desire to make one). Just know that we're all rooting for this project to flourish. It's time for Zeal to go.. It's dated, and has a lot of inherent annoyances.

Anyway.....

Is it possible to download a working version of this to try out without having to download the loaaaaaads of dependencies the development version requires? (specifically the gigantic list of dependencies needed for lucene++)

I definitely want to give this a go, but I'm not able to offer any help with development because I'm not familiar with the languages.

Side note: I'm on Linux (Ubuntu Wily)

[jkozera]

Hi! Thanks for the encouragement! :) I don't really intend to replace Zeal completely, it still has its niche with the support for all those Dash docs (not possible with Zest, as per zealdocs/zeal#24)

To reply to your question, it seems I probably didn't make it clear that the zest-v0.1.0-alpha2-pre.tar.gz file available at https://github.com/zestdocs/zest/releases actually contains a runnable binary. It should work with most distros (tested on Fedora and Ubuntu). Did you try downloading it?

[dsifford]

@jkozera Thanks for the clarification. I downloaded the tarball the other day, unzipped it, and ran the binary and the app started, but the screen was completely blank. I figured I didn't have the right dependencies installed.

Has @Kapeli caught wind of this project? Is there ever a possibility that he would shift his docset agreement from Zeal to Zest if this proves to be a much better (and much more full-featured) application?

[jkozera]

Thanks for checking the binary. The idea is that it should include all the necessary dependencies. I've tried with a fresh Ubuntu 15.10 installation and realized that there was indeed a problem with rpath missing for the bundled liblucene++.so.0 which I didn't notice before. I've updated the binary at https://github.com/zestdocs/zest/releases/download/v0.1.0-alpha2/zest-v0.1.0-alpha2-pre.tar.gz and tested again. It should be fine now. (Note you still have to open File->Settings to download documentation, otherwise it will look almost like blank screen.)

The problem with docset agreement is about this part: "the docsets will be available for as long as Zeal does not officially support OS X and hence will not directly compete with Dash". Zest supports OS X.

[dsifford]

Thanks @jkozera. I'll give this a shot later on this afternoon.

Re: the OSX conundrum -- would it be a foul on the agreement to just build in a system check that limits those features to users running OSX? Something along the lines of

if [[ uname == "Darwin" ]]; then
    # no docsets for you!
fi

[jkozera]

@dsifford Re: Dash docsets, unfortunately there's another issue - AFAIK @Kapeli doesn't want to promote apps that promote competition, and DevDocs is such a competition.

[dsifford]

@jkozera Shame.

Well, at any rate, if you decide to scrape your own datasets (preferably consumable, open-source ones) for Zest after you push a stable release, let me know. I'd be more than happy to help you there.

I'd help devdocs with theirs, but it seems like they have their own agenda regarding which docsets are prioritized, regardless of the votes. (But I suppose I could be mistaken)

[jkozera]

@dsifford fair enough, thanks for your support. Can this issue be closed now? I mean, it's about the compiled version - does it work now?

[dsifford]

@jkozera Sorry for derailing!

So the app works, I can download docsets from Devdocs and it says that I downloaded the full stack-overflow, but the search bar does not function

This is logged to the console after a single keystroke in the searchbar...

[jkozera]

I guess that's poor UX which needs improvements:

1. You need to "Build index" in settings manually to make DevDocs search work.
2. You need to choose tags that interest you from Stack Overflow dump and build the index there manually too. ("Create index" button below the list of tags) It can take couple of hours to build the index.

DevDocs index is going to be built automatically in some of later releases.

[dsifford]

Gotcha... Is there any way to choose a tag that isn't listed in the predefined tags?

I'm interested in Golang specifically.

[jkozera]

Not yet, sorry, that's another thing in my TODO list. Feel free to raise a separate issue for it. :)

[dsifford]

Also, now that I'm looking at this, I tried to "Build Index" for DevDocs the other day and it haults at 14/17

Can both indices be running simultaneously? It appears that the stackoverflow one is chugging away without any issues.

[jkozera]

Hm, interesting, they should be able to run in parallel, yes. Can you share your list of downloaded docs from DevDocs? Could be a bug related to some particular one.

[dsifford]

Docsets

1. cpp
2. css
3. dom
4. dom_events
5. git
6. go
7. http
8. javascript
9. jquery
10. lodash~4
11. node
12. php
13. python~3.5
14. react
15. relay
16. webpack

Interesting --- I only have 16 docsets selected and the indexer thinks I have 17.. Hmm

[jkozera]

I guess that's another confusing thing. There's always one more item to process, the last one (17th in your case) is the combined symbols index. The remaining ones are for full text search index. Anyway, thanks for the list! I'll try it and see if any of these docs cause issues.

[dsifford]

Np. Happy to be of help

[jkozera]

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce. Do you want to send me compressed contents of your $HOME/.config/zest/devdocs/docs directory so I could see if you perhaps have some incorrectly downloaded data?

[dsifford]

Sure - shoot me an email: dereksifford@gmail.com