More granular control over HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE

[rtruxal]

added a bing arg to the cmdline interface so HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE can be set within the howdoi process itself.

[WindSoilder]

If we want to add a command line arguments, I would recommend using -e --engine bing rather than simple -b argument.

If we use simple -b argument, what if we need to support another search engine like Duckduckgo or yandex? Finally we will mess up when we support more search engines in the user interface.

[rtruxal]

Did it.

[paulie-g]

This is going to need some work with the new caching code in the fastcache branch.

[gleitz]

I'm wrestling with adding additional command line arguments that can already be achieved with environment variables. For example consider the following:

alias howdoi_bing='HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE="bing" howdoi'

then

» howdoi -l -n3 format date bash
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401482/yyyy-mm-dd-format-date-in-shell-script

================================================================================

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Oar9zh1xk10J:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401482/yyyy-mm-dd-format-date-in-shell-script+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

================================================================================

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6508819/convert-date-formats-in-bash

is different than

» howdoi_bing -l -n3 format date bash
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401482/yyyy-mm-dd-format-date-in-shell-script

================================================================================

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6508819/convert-date-formats-in-bash

================================================================================

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14152759/linux-bash-date-format

Thoughts?

[paulie-g]

You're absolutely right. With that said, environment variables ought not be the primary interface - that's just poor UX. However, bing results are so poor for howdoi's purposes that I don't think it matters - no one other than people who can't use google for some reason are likely to want to use bing.

[gleitz]

Yes the main reason I could see users switching away from Google is if they're blocked due to a rate limit, or if using howdoi from a country that blocks Google. I think the best thing to do would be a note on the README page that includes the following snippet

alias howdoi_bing='HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE="bing" howdoi'

[paulie-g]

I'm not opposed to adding this in future, I just don't currently have the bandwidth to go through what this would do to the new caching. Probably nothing bad other than output cache not hitting, I just don't recall (several ksloc deep into a couple other projects atm).

In principle, I'd like to see a better config layer that accepts a .py config file in appdirs.user_config_dir, env vars, command line arguments or py dict when howdoi is used as a library. And a man page. I'd take that over ad hoc tweaks to particular settings.

Edit: this comment is not me volunteering to implement that ;)

[paulie-g]

To be clear, I see no harm in adding this and no reason not to do it, provided it doesn't break anything. I'd say wait until dev is merged into master, rebase/eliminate merge conflicts if necessary, and wait for @rtruxal to test and confirm that it doesn't break the new caching (by break I mean errors, not misses). Being picky with relatively small patches that are clearly not net negative is not a good way to keep new contributors involved and interested imo.

[gleitz]

Ok I just merged dev into master. Would you please rebase @rtruxal?

[paulie-g]

Appears to have no conflicts. @rtruxal please test that it doesn't break caching (run with HOWDOI_DISABLE_CACHE, without, on clear/full cache and so on), and address https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi/pull/235/files#r278707922

If all goes well, and by @gleitz 's assent, I think this can go in :)

[rtruxal]

@paulie-g - Sounds good. I will try to do this over the weekend.

[gleitz]

@rtruxal no rush but lemme know if those checks passes and you're ready to merge.

[rtruxal]

Gahhh thank you for the reminder.

[rtruxal]

So good-news/bad-news:

good news - I checked the new arg against the fastercache branch and everything appears to be fine (using HOWDOI_DISABLE_CACHE, full/empty cache)

bad-news - The optional positional arg doesn't work. howdoi -e do things gets broken up into howdoi ==> -e do ==> things. I can't immediately think of a way to fix this, other than switching it back or making the positional argument mandatory.

[gleitz]

I think the correct usage should be

howdoi -e bing do things

[gleitz]

Thanks for this!