New Howto

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jun 5, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Rainer Müller wrote:

> We already have spread our website over enough different places.  
> There is macports.org, trac.macports.org and guide.macports.org (and  
> the upcoming MPWA at db.macports.org). It is already hard enough to  
> find the relevant information one is looking for. If we now add yet  
> another new site, this will become even worse.

Rainer, I'm beginning to wonder if you just like to argue.  I know,  
the thought of a german who likes to argue - it's almost impossible to  
conceive of, isn't it?  :-)

I was thinking of a somewhat broader problem space than just MacPorts  
here, given that the notion of writing "howtos" ultimately and  
logically extends well beyond just the software you choose to add  
explicitly yourself.  There are also other projects on macosforge who  
would like to see their own howtos on various topics, some of which  
are essentially meta-topics ("you must know foo before you can  
understand bar, even though foo is not logically in the domain of what  
we are doing").   Rather than have multiple people re-write howtos  
like "The Unix PATH and how it affects you", it would therefore be  
better to have a group of documentation-centric people who maintain  
howtos (or mediawiki pages) like that, whether or not they're also  
members of the macports project (or the ruby project or the webkit  
project) being essentially irrelevant as long as they can write good  
docs.  There's no rule that says all developers have to be in one and  
only one project, or that all projects have to force all URLs into a  
single domain in order for people to find stuff.  From my perspective,  
knowing I can go to http://howto.macosforge.org or http://doc.macosforge.org, 
  or whatever the heck we might decide to call it, and find all the  
docs that the various projects are publishing seems to make it a lot  
EASIER to find the information I am looking for rather than the  
opposite.

More to the point, if we feel it's appropriate to have a general  
documentation project on MacOSForge, we're going to create one  
regardless of what macports decides to do since we have plenty of meta- 
topics to cover, including but not limited to general rules of the  
road for open source collaboration, how to use MacOSForge itself, etc  
etc.   In comparison with that, splintering the docs into different  
domains and documentation formats seems a lot more confusing to me as  
well as having the potential to turn away contributors who would like  
to write end-user tutorials on using popular software but don't  
actually use macports.   What's been done in macports so far  
represents an excellent start, don't get me wrong, but it's also  
raising the question as to whether or not it's happening in precisely  
the right project context and/or using the right tools.

In any case, there's little point in arguing about this since the  
bigger picture goal here is going to evolve independently of any  
argument you or I might have anyway, so I think both you and I can  
save our fingerpads this time around.

- Jordan

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