handbook: cvs or wiki?

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 justin at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> > By the way, I mentioned in the dfwiki using the "recent changes", I didn't
> > see any changes to the handbook in the "last 500 changes in last 30 days".
> > How can I see the changes myself?
>
> You could probably plug larger values into the query string when looking
> at that history...

Thanks. I manually did that and it worked. I did "the last 1500 changes in
last 1000 days" and it went back to March 26, 2005 which I assume was the
beginning of this wiki.

I learned that a few handbook pages were spammed a few times and then the
spams reverted.

I saw that the mirrors chapter was modified to fix s/FreeBSD/DragonFly
BSD/ but it also added a new vendor but removed the previous vendor (who
does advertise DragonFly products). I assume this was accidental and not
an attempt to remove competition. (I fixed this in my CVS and can provide
a diff once anoncvs works for me again.)

A sudo chapter appeared to be added.

The basics chapter had some modifications for the "mount" section. As the
wiki diff output is a little unclear (for example
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php?title=DragonFly_Handbook/mount-unmount&curid=865&diff=1342&oldid=1341),
I was not able to quickly see or understand all the changes.

I looked again with a different browser and see it was just color coding
that showed differences -- one mispelling fix.

Then I notice that the wiki says it is the "Handbook", but in CVS is the
"usersguide" (en/books/usersguide/book.sgml).

What is the plan for the usersguide? Should this be merged into the
handbook? For example, maybe en/books/handbook/ports/chapter.sgml and
en/books/usersguide/ports/chapter.sgml could be merged?

> > I'd like to suggest that the wiki for the handbook be removed and then
> > generate the HTML from the docbook source with a feedback form on every
> > single handbook webpage.  Then someone can share their comments and
> > improvements easily.
> >
> > A committer would have to review and commit, but that is a lot easier than
> > merging in changes later.
>
> Any objections to this from other docs@ readers?  I like the idea of the
> wiki, but I'm not seeing a huge benefit from it.  It may be better to
> retry it someday when we do have a method for moving wiki -> docbook and
> back.


 Jeremy C. Reed

 	  	 	 BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD links
	  	 	 http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/