Re: A starting proposal for library.gnome.org

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 11/11/03 11:09, Curtis C. Hovey wrote:

> I may be going to far. Jeff and Glynn may explain the plan better than
>
> this.  Glynn is out to overhaul d.g.o, tossing out the cruft and
> consolidating the remaining.  Jeff wants to tightly focus d.g.o on the
> gnome developer community, and move the documents to library.gnome.org.
> d.g.o's content could be merged with w.g.o in the future.
>
> If the sites are unified, then it seams natural to explore putting
> w.g.o's documents into the library.  The w.g.o and f.g.o documents are
> written for their respective audiences, so they do seem out of place in
> a library dominated by technical documents.  If there is little
> crossover for the material, I'm not inclined to merge them into the
> library.
>  
Okay, I see where you are coming from.

My main argument then is that (a) the majority of stuff you proposed for 
library.g.o is currently on d.g.o, (b) there isn't much other stuff on 
d.g.o.  From this point of view, it seems fairly pointless to rename the 
site (given that people know about the current one ...).

> Permanent URLs, managed growth, and serving the users are the goals.

Sure.  It would be good if we could get this on all the websites.  
Things like the www.g.o/start/2.4/ pages are a good example of planning 
for the future.

> > Marking obsolete content as such sounds good (as opposed to removing it, 
> > or leaving it untouched).  A notice like this should be obvious so that 
> > people don't miss it, but not so annoying that it makes the document 
> > difficult to read (ie. no flashing "obsolete" watermark as a background 
> > image).
> >    
>
> I was thinking the same.  I like how w3.org handles versions, status,
> and related documents.
>  
Well, the W3C's method seems to be to code the status of the document 
into the URL (working draft, candidate recomendation, etc).  I don't see 
any markings on their final documents saying they are obsolete.

> I was thinking that the site needs a template to render the DocBook
> material with a unified style for the site.
>  
I posted a simple set of stylesheets to do consistent rendering of 
DocBook and XHTML to this list a while back (it should be in the 
archives).  It also allowed for marking up single pages with docbook 
(ie. not producing chunked output), which might be a good idea for some 
of our longer documents.

> > Would versionning these guides according to Gnome platform version make 
> > sense?  If a new revision of a guide covers a different Gnome platform 
> > version, would you keep the old one?
> >    
>
> The value of the library is that it preserves the older material.  Some
> developers/companies cannot upgrade their code quickly enough, so we
> need to offer the resources they need.  Of course we need to convey to
> the developers that the documents are obsolete, and provide some
> direction to where the developer can learn the consequences of not
> upgrading.
>  
This was more of a general question of how many changes can you make to 
a document before it needs a new name/URL, rather than just replacing 
the old revision.  It is probably a good idea to have a policy about 
this for various parts of the website.

> > > Case studies
> > >      
> > I think these should really be on www.gnome.org and made quite 
> > prominent.  They should be one of the things we use to sell Gnome to people.
> >    
>
> I included cases studies in my use cases for w.g.o.  I think case
> studies will sit well in a library because they will be used by
> developers, users, and, organizations.  Case studies will become dated
> so it would be better to depreciate them then toss them away.
>  
(I assume you mean deprecate here).  If you use a sensible URL for the 
case study (eg. include the year in it), and mark it obsolete if 
necessary, then it should be fine.

When I think of case studies, I usually think of documents designed to 
convince other people to use Gnome by showing how existing people use it 
and how it has made their life easier/saves them money.  In other words, 
their purpose is primarily for marketing.  Are you thinking of something 
different?

> Sending the press and users to a URL with library in stead of www as the
> host undermines the authority of the press release.  Moving old ones to
> a library sounds sensible, but I dislike breaking inbound links.
>  
Why bother moving press releases off www.g.o?  I was suggesting putting 
press releases into directories corresponding to the year of release.  
The press release index could easily be modified to move the links to 
old releases onto an "archives" index.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/