Date: 27 Jan 2002 18:03:41 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org> Cc: doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Practicalities of FAQ->Handbook migrations Message-ID: <q37kq3nsea.kq3@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20020127115139.GU5234@klapaucius.zer0.org> References: <20020121140800.A54903@blackhelicopters.org> <20020121215313.K18715@clan.nothing-going-on.org> <20020121174711.A56388@blackhelicopters.org> <20020127115139.GU5234@klapaucius.zer0.org>
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Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org> writes: > I understand the need for such an index document. There is a wealth of > FreeBSD information in the FAQ, Handbook, Committer's Guide, articles, > books, manual pages, O'Reillynet articles, Daemon News articles, > hardcopy books, graphics, ascii art, and also a few hundred web sites, > some of it very difficult to find despite its potential utility to many > FreeBSD users. > > The Documentation Project seems the logical organization to provide an > index of pointers to and within these resources. Instead of "jumbo > FAQ", though, perhaps the FreeBSD Documentation Index would be a better, > and sufficiently pretentious, name. Is this the kind of thing you were > talking about, Michael? I have thought that the best way to handle such a massive and maintenance-intensive project, would be to have a Wiki (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki) for it. Let users add and fix links as they will (subject to a team of monitors, mainly to back out vandalism). But that would be a large project in itself and there are legal risks. I think it's vital to have the navigation of such information be guided by hand-edited indexes and/or keyword associations (as opposed to raw searches), but when it comes to things like the Handbook and man pages, something automated would be very helpful, though with a Wiki and lots of helpful users, it might not be necessary. Rich Morin's Meta Project (http://cantaforda.com/Meta/) has some very interesting stuff which uses both automation and hand-editing. P.S. I had a large Linux index (which I (barely) started to FreeBSD-ize at eupedia.org) before they became common commercial enterprises, and learned how fast links go bad. (I guess the FreeBSD Project stuff should be stable enough.) I came to the conclusion that I need to develop a tool to ease link maintanence (and creation) before messing further with it. Existing free tools are inadequate. I'm planning a mostly-Python thing that will include the maintenance tools as part of a program that will serve pages to either a Web browser (for local use) or a Web server (for use on WWW). I'll start without a RDBMS (for easier installation), and see how much I miss it. Maybe have it generate "diffs" so people can send me entries they've added to theirs. It will have both indexes and a keyword search field which normally brings up only eupedia-based info (entries like definitions or hand-edited (and/or constructed-by-keywords-match) subindex pages). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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