Re: Please comment on Online XEmacs Manuals

Stephen> Thanks for your hard work on this. APA> Do the manuals work for you? Stephen> One quick lookup worked well for me. APA> Have you noticed any breakage in them? Stephen> I got the wrong #tag URL in my browser (Mozilla) the Stephen> first time, doing a reload in browser fixed it (thus it Stephen> was not a typo in my entry). This is probably not an Stephen> XEmacs-side problem (either network interruption or Stephen> Mozilla screwage), but I mention it in case it comes up Stephen> again. OK, thanks. APA> The big questions I can't decide on are these: Stephen> These are hard questions. For one thing, there should be Stephen> only one manual source, and it should be keyed to Stephen> versions internally (either some sort of ＠if, or in the Stephen> text mentioning that the versions of XEmacs differ). But Stephen> this is obviously a huge job. So we can't hold the web Stephen> site responsbile for it. Phui, you almost scared me! Stephen> I would say the most generally useful would be the beta Stephen> manuals. They probably describe gamma pretty accurately, OK, Martin felt that way too when I asked this a while back. For our users I would bet that latest stable would be more useful. Stephen> in places more accurately than the gamma manuals do. Stephen> They are also relatively likely to contain improvements Stephen> in explanations and stuff. How about currently stable and beta, then? If we start feeling the need, we can still add gamma for increased lifetime of the docs (beta -> gamma -> stable). Stephen> The organization stuff is web-maintainer specific. My Stephen> feeling is that if we end up with more than one set of Stephen> manuals on line, the published URLs should be Stephen> minor-version specific (eg, 21.1, 21.4), and the symbolic Stephen> tags (stable, gamma) should be mentioned only in the Stephen> index.html. That way the URLs stay stable with new Stephen> releases. Good, we agree. Stephen> The exception is "beta" instead of "21.5", the latter The former or the latter? Stephen> would get renamed upon release, which is icky, and using Stephen> "beta" properly reflects the continuity of the trunk. Stephen> That is, at release of 21.5, beta gets _cloned_, not Stephen> _moved_, to 22.0. I though of physically storing manuals under Documentation/{21.1,21.4,21.5} and switching around symlinks to them. Please explain more if I didn't seem to catch your drift here. Thanks, Stephen, for the feedback! Adrian Stephen> -- Stephen> Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp Stephen> University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Stephen> Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; Stephen> ask what your business can "do for" free software. -- Adrian Aichner mailto:adrian＠xemacs.org http://www.xemacs.org/