I'm starting to dive into subversion development so I can fix a few
long-standing VirtualHost/mod_dav_svn bugs that I keep hitting, and I'm
noticing that most of the major documents are several years old, and
obviously pre-1.0.
In theory, everyone could contribute today to these docs; they're in
SVN, and we could submit patches. In reality, the effort of going
through a patch submission just to clarify some language or add a
helpful tip is a barrier. (My existence proof is, again, the state of
the docs.) Meanwhile, there's talk about how to automate processes so
the project can handle more developers. Well, have -I- got a solution
for -you-.
From my brief experience with developer wikis in the Rails world, wikis
are better at staying current. Technically, they're no different than
checked-in text files as we have today. But you're read them online,
and if you see something that needs changing, you click a button and
change it, right then and there. They tend to need "gardening" once in
a while, to refactor a bunch of comments into a more coherent form, but
they remain updated due to their more interactive nature; every reader's
an editor. And, of course, they're revision-controlled. There have been
problems with wiki spam, but that's easily solvable with minimal access
controls/registration.
I'd be willing to do the work to port the existing docs to a wiki and
set it up; I'm thinking Trac, since that could pave the way for eventual
migration from bugzilla to Trac for issue-tracking, if such a thing is
ever desired. (In fact, I'd be willing to do the work for that, too;
the tight integration between design docs, issue tracking and source
code is a wonder to behold.)
Is this desired by the dev team? I could pre-host it on my own server
for testing, and then just tar the whole thing up to transfer to tigris
when people feel it's ready for prime time.
Jay Levitt
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Received on Tue Oct 18 23:50:38 2005