[I tried to send to the list last night and mistakenly sent it only to Stephen. So, here it is for the list; follow-ups trimmed down. 8^)= Also, with his permission, I'll be bouncing Stephen's reply to me back to the list. The next message from me is actually from him. jsja.] "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Is there somewhere this 'Review Board' business is explained? I've seen it referred to a couple of times and I gather it's basically the XEmacs Cabal (there is no cabal). Is this correct? I do think a Minister of Information-Dissemination type position is a good idea. That is, a person _ultimately_ (but not necessarily _personally_) responsible for the FAQ, coordinating the documentation versions and formats, announcing releases to Freshmeat and the newsgroups, evangelism and proselytizing, etc., etc. It seems like having someone do this type of stuff would be another step towards getting more developer time towards development. Or maybe the developer-type people prefer to handle this themselves? Definitely a good idea, IMHO. 8^)= Actually, the directory structure is going to change as little as I can help it, (from what it is right now). I've seen ump-teen links to www.xemacs.org during my link gathering expeditions, which was why the old mess of content is still there -- so those links don't break. Yes, that's a good place to send stuff that needs to go up. I plan on 24 to 48 hour turnaround for any and all submissions; just send it. Don't worry about HTML if you don't want to, I can do that easily too. Of course, if you've got access, feel free to do it yourself, also. Send me a note and let me know, or at least modify the comments in the page header. (Add another <META type="author"> tag.) I'm not sure why this is a Good Thing. Files aren't going to move. Files might get added, content might get changed, but files won't move, because then URLs break and that's Bad. I guess the Review Board would get updates for file adds and file mods, too, but do they care? I respect what Jan is asking for. I also admit up front that my practical knowledge of CVS is zero (read: never used it). However, I don't see how doing what sounds like a reasonably complicated amount of work to set up CVS buys. As Stephen says, public write access, or wide-spread write access isn't all that desirable, so you're going to need some kind of submission/confirmation system, much like the current patch list. We've already got the submission/confirmation part (mail webmaster(a)xemacs.org stuff, I (or somebody else) posts it, we tell you it's posted). The only advantage to CVS would be (1) maintaining a local 'source' tree for the web site and (2) making sure two people weren't editing the file at the same time. Is that worth the effort, or is there something I'm missing? I don't know if I'm on 'that round the world trip', as I'm not sure what that is. I do know that if you're going to spend time laying out an intelligent and workable (IMNSHO) design, it's important to use that as consistently as possible, across the whole site. Otherwise, you end up confusing and frustrating your users. It seems as if a working solution might lie with the use of extensive SSI in the next version of the template. That way, the design, such as it is, isn't really accessible from the template, and it becomes much easier to add content, and make it apparent who the author is, etc., etc. The template can even be made publicly available for download, so that people who want to add stuff can grab it, fill it out, and send it in. Conceivably, a web interface to this could be setup which would auto-mail stuff to webmaster(a)xemacs.org. (Ohhh...that's an idea to remember, I think...) CVS-guru's: Can the CVS system check to make sure a particular feature exists in a file before it's accepted for check-in? That is, if an Author: type field is defined, can check-ins of files lacking that field be blocked? Anyway, that's about it for now, I think. Changes sent to me today didn't get made, but will be made no later than 2400 MST/1700 UTC tomorrow. Good night, john. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ John S Jacobs Anderson Apprentice Geek jacobs(a)azstarnet.com Journeyman Molecular Biologist <URL:http://www.treefort.org/~jacobs/> <- GeneHack:bioinfo*linux*opinion