kiwix-serve - replace all options with directory listing like a normal web server and phase away kiwix-manage

[evrial]

Currently we have a weird situation that kiwix-serve doesn't accept a location, but only library.xml or individual zim files. I propose to deprecate kiwix-manage, library approach and serve a location and display only zim files and subdirectories structure like all normal servers when browsing of file tree allowed.

[kelson42]

@evrial To me globbing is good enough to loads tons of ZIM easily. What is your exact use case?

[evrial]

@evrial To me globbing is good enough to loads tons of ZIM easily. What is your exact use case?

I want a location tree structure, globbing hundreds of devdocs*.zim isn't ideal approach.

[kelson42]

@evrial To me globbing is good enough to loads tons of ZIM easily. What is your exact use case?

I want a location tree structure, globbing hundreds of devdocs*.zim isn't ideal approach.

Just to be sure: what is the problem doing so?

[evrial]

The problem is I need to restart the server each time a file is removed or updated to newer version. I wish to use folders to organize the library.

[kelson42]

@evrial We call this function "folder monitoring". It has been implemented once in Kiwix For Windows and Linux. It might be indeed an idea to implement it for Kiwix Server as well... but this is for sure not a replacement to kiwix-manage.

[evrial]

The server simply need to scan the location tree every request/refresh of the page and show it's content to user, that's how servers operate for 50 years.

[kelson42]

The server simply need to scan the location tree every request/refresh of the page and show it's content to user, that's how servers operate for 50 years.

We won't to that for sure as it would be extremly inefficient. But I keep the idea and will rephrase the whole issue as wee need to articulate the feature with other (library) "monitoring" option.

[evrial]

it would be extremly inefficient

No, it would be the same as listing a directory and display only *.zim files and folders. You did the similar work with apache plugin, it is exactly the same as mod_php, but for ZIM files. There is no place here for monitoring.