emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: the Emacs wiki


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: the Emacs wiki
Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 12:58:36 +0200

> From: Stephen Leake <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 04:41:49 -0600
> 
> What is the intended process for maintaining the wiki?
> 
> Suppose I want to clean up all references to Bazaar, and make sure the
> wiki presents a clear and consistent picture of the Emacs development
> process?
> 
> I can easily do that in ./CONTRIBUTE, because it will be reviewed by the
> other Emacs developers.
> 
> Finding things in the wiki is a nightmare. Maintaining them is worse.
> 
> I don't mind maintaining one or two wiki pages, as long as they are referenced
> from CONTRIBUTE as important web pages. That's my concession to the "we must
> use the web" bandwagon. Anything more than that is unmaintainable.
> 
> It would make more sense if there was a higher-level wiki page that was
> well maintained, that talked more about Emacs in general, not just how
> to use git.

(You forgot to mention that the Wiki stuff is uncontrolled and
therefore its quality sucks.)

Wiki is a hydra you cannot cut enough heads off to make it die.  I
tried, and failed miserably.  I suggest you don't waste your efforts
and time on that.

Ideally, everything that's valuable on the Wiki should be in some
manual under doc/misc/.  But there are people out there that just
cannot be convinced, and I stopped trying.

The best we can do is to add such manuals to Emacs, maintain them to
be always up to date, and hope that the Wiki will die of natural
causes, because it falls behind.  But adding that stuff under doc/
requires a dedicated volunteer, which is hard to get by, because the
job sounds like a waste of resources (and in some sense, it really
is).

Bottom line, I suggest that we make the best effort we can to have our
documentation in this area as good as it gets, and turn a blind eye
towards the Wiki.  Then, if people come up, here or on help-gnu-emacs,
complaining that the Wiki says something that isn't correct, we could
just tell them that the Wiki isn't supported by the project, and
advise them to look at our documents instead.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]