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Re: why is the wiki page on building octave so lacking?


From: oz123
Subject: Re: why is the wiki page on building octave so lacking?
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:40:34 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Everyone, 

First, thanks for your replies. A few answers for a few different comment. 

@carne: 
I actually read that post you linked to, when it was published by john. But
i admit that I didn't follow up due to lack of time. 
I never claimed things were done in secret or so. I don't feel things were
censored. I just feel we are shooting a good piece of software in the leg
when we remove good content from the wiki. 
For example Debian or Ubuntu or Arch all have in their wikis parallel pages,
which cover the same topic from different aspects, or simply because they
are written in different styles by different users. A software wiki should
not be wikipedia which contains a single article for an object. 
As pages grow they could be split and diverge. For example the install pages
on linux can have up to date info about some issue with installing latest
octave on Distro X. I found for example octave didn't build with gcc-4.6 (it
did build nicely with gcc-4.4. So I put it in my blog, because I wanted
people to know about it. This info could be an should be in many places
(e.g. Debian's wiki, Octave's, developers blogs, and users blog). 
M%#lab has 1000s of books and articles published on it, blogs, websites
mailing list, octave has maybe 100 books published on in. So, my point is,
don't erase data on octave, it's not helping us. 

@john
in response to "No, I'd prefer to maintain the information in one place, in
the manual, "
Go ahead but the whole purpose of the wiki is that you or developers do not
need to maintain the 
wiki. The wiki should be as complementary thing. It should not replace the
manual, but at times it should
have information the the manual does not contain (yet), won't contain or
can't.

I don't think that having information in two places or in two forms is bad.
Yes, the manual has instructions
how to install octave on linux. But it's edited in a way that a few people
find hard to understand (including myself). So, I wrote that blog post (btw,
it gets about ~10 hits per week ...). 
The manual includes at the moment 812 pages (!) and the installation is in
the end of it. To me it seems a weired editing choice, because before you
can use Octave you need to install it. 
This brings me to the Jordi's suggestion: to submit a patch for the wiki.
Let's see what the average user needs to do to contribute to that manual:

1. Download the sources
2. learn the syntax of the language that is used to produce the manual
3. commit the changes that he did in a mercurial way.

and finally his patch needs to be explained and ACCEPTED. If it's not
accepted it's a pure waste of his time (except maybe the adventure of
learning new stuff ...)

I speculate that most people will  be deterred by that. On the other had
many people can edit wiki pages. 
For them, the wiki should be there, and old content that appears in the
manual should not be removed. even if it's outdated (I have customers using
Octave 3.0 and address@hidden 2007, and in the same time they use Octave 3.6 and
address@hidden 2011 so you see why information is not so quickly outdated. )  

About what should be in the Manual. The manual is pretty big, and I admit I
never read all of it. There's just not enough time. Some of the installation
info is found in INSTALL.OCTAVE found with the sources, and most people who
can do "make && make install" will probably read it. However the manual is
there too also for first references for those of us who can't do more with
less in the shell. For them it would be nice maybe to have a nice manual or
html page or that wiki page which covers everything from A-Z on how to
install octave. In the manual this is section G.1.1, which is not available
when you down load the source, if you don't know how to use make (because
the manual is coming as latex sources...). 
The manual in the Internet is 3 clicks down in Section G. This is
inconvenient as said before by others. 

Finally, I'd like to request: let me restore that content on the page in the
Wiki. I think it's very good page, and I think it should be available for
people searching for solutions. 

Thanks again for all the replies. 

Oz

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