[Mediawiki-l] Including search results from external sources?

["Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)"]

We're a (small) software development shop that would like to use 
MediaWiki as our main internal website.

We have both MediaWiki and non-MediaWiki documentation such as  perl-pod 
and javadoc stored in our version control system and a bugzilla 
installation. What we'd like is to be able to enter "foo" in the 
MediaWiki search field, and find MediaWiki pages with "foo" (like now), 
but *also* find "foo" in e.g the javadoc, perldoc, source code and 
present a potentially external link such as: 
http://server/javadoc.cgi?src=SomeClass.java .

I've been searching for a solution looking all over for this, and I 
can't believe we're the first people interested in this.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki/14457 shows no 
replies but is basically the same question.

I see three different approaches:

1) Pre-parse the perldoc, javadoc etc. and keep some internal MediaWiki 
pages up-to-date with the parsed external sources. Then MediaWiki's 
existing search will be able to index and find data in them. But the 
syncing is messy and we don't need to edit java code from inside 
MediaWiki anyway. Also, original formatting may get lost.

2) Modify MediaWiki's internal search e.g. like Extension:Lucene-search 
and somehow squeeze in a link to 
http://server/javadoc.cgi?src=SomeClass.java

3) Create a meta search thingy, so when searched for "foo", it calls the 
unmodified MediaWiki search and presents *these* results, then presents 
results for searching of javadoc etc.

At this point we don't care much about performance. The internal server 
is basically unloaded and we expect 10 searches a day tops. But we 
insist on the functionality. So e.g. "grep -r 'foo' java" is a viable 
option for us to produce the java search results. So for the sake of 
argument lets leave performance aside.

But how do we get these external search results integrated into our 
MediaWiki "frontend"?

More detail on what we're trying to do here: 
http://www.morch.com/2009/02/10/documentation-git-and-mediawiki/

Peter
-- 
Peter Valdemar Mørch
http://www.morch.com