Re: [Fwd: Re: really attracting developers]

[Nikolaus Waxweiler]

> Applications have lots of
> metadata about them - some of it you can bodge into a wiki with Category
> tags and so on, but not much.  Consider how much easier it is to find
> an application on Freshmeat than a whole-web search engine.

Mh. Tags like "[Translations]" and "[Environment]" can be perfectly  
emulated with categories and then listed on a special page. Statistics not  
so much, but they're not essential anyway. But yes, this might become  
unwieldy when the number of GNUstep apps hit 1000 or so, I give in :O.

The current appdb runs on WebObjects, good, but needs some updating of  
both functionality and look. So much to do, so little time...

> > What does the release or popularity of a project have to do with using  
> > a wiki as the homepage?
>
> Volume of material to store, for one.

Well... Wikipedia!!!1

...?!

> I don't find white on white to be a nice colour combination.  Maybe your
> eyes work normally and you have your browser default to black-on-white?

So you're looking for a skin where colors and font-sizes are only set when  
necessary and you get to use your browser defaults? Try the "Simple" skin:  
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=simple. Set it  
in Preferences -> Skins.

Also, if you use Firefox or Opera, you can set specific user stylesheets  
for certain (or all) sites manually. I forgot how, though.

> It depends which device I'm using, but the cookie requirements of the
> mediawiki seem not documented anywhere on it.  Yes, I could step through
> and yes/no each cookie, but that's a PITA.  Why don't you fix the wiki?

Hum. According to Google, Mediawiki supports logging in for a session, so  
I guess there's a way to avoid cookies. What happens when you don't check  
"remember me"?

Try activating accepting of cookies, logging into the wiki and setting  
"remember me", then deactivating accepting of cookies. You should stay  
logged in, but this is just a wild guess. Also, I'm no PHP dev :O.

> This is part of the problem - WikiFarmers seem to be ignorant of web
> technology like P3P or WCAG and don't care.  Most seem happy with the
> idea of survival of the fittest and see obstructing others are part of
> showing their fitness.  Surprisingly given that, they also seem to be
> ignorant of history and unwilling to research, such as why the hostname
> was mediawiki.gnustep.org for a while.

Now you're sounding bitter -- they probably just didn't *know* some people  
had difficulties with their site, so you need to tell them explicitly.  
Don't just hint at non-WCAG-compliance :)

And really, the hostname thing was a cosmetic issue.

> I edit stuff offline by synchronising online, editing offline, then
> synchronising again when I get back online.  Copy-pasting between text
> files and browser is very primitive - it would nuke other later changes
> on upload, wouldn't it?

Yes, but what other way is there short of having access to SVN and  
therefore being able to easily merge changes? It's the same with a static  
website or a content management system without such capabilities. Someone  
changes it while you're editing away and you'll have to use diff and/or  
patch. The chances of colliding might be less if you edit just a section,  
not the whole page.

> I mean copies kept on gnustep.org in case the original goes off-line.

Wiki pages are kept on-site and are easier to publish/pass around because  
you know there aren't going to be outdated mirrors.

> That said, texinfo has
> been around a lot longer than mediawiki's not-quite-wiki markup and is
> more consistent across platforms.

So is HTML generated by a wiki :O. Plus, you can adjust font sizes and  
whatnot.

> One big plus of document-style markup is that we can format them into
> whatever is the current 'house style' without needing to enforce a tight
> style guide like discussed in
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2006-09/msg00189.html
> Single-site wiki markup rules seem far worse than one author using  
> texinfo.

Point 1, a hierarchy, relates to the structure (-> navigation) of the  
wiki, not single articles. Point 2 really applies only to the application  
pages, because he didn't know that I originally intended to import the  
software infobox from Wikipedia (see the box to the right on  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnustep) which is a template that takes  
arguments. You don't have to care about layout when writing normal  
articles and whatnot. You structure the text, Mediawiki does the  
formatting for you.

> Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, but terrible as an
> information source and people who rely on it make some hilarious
> mistakes.

Alright, lets stay with manual registration ;)