discuss: When is a doc out-of-date ?(was Re: LDP Database is now on gldp.org)
Subject:
Re: When is a doc out-of-date ?(was Re: LDP Database is now on
gldp.org)
From:
Gregory Leblanc ####@####.####
Date:
27 Nov 2001 19:56:03 -0000
Message-Id: <1006890733.1535.10.camel@peecee>
On Mon, 2001-11-26 at 23:40, David Lawyer wrote:
> > On Mon, 2001-11-26 at 21:35, David Lawyer wrote:
> [snip]
> > > While it's interesting to know the time since the last update, a
> > > doc that has been recently updated can still be quite out-of-date.
>
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 09:38:15PM -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > Do you have a better metric of how 'dated' the material of a given HOWTO
> > is?
>
> One way is to have different categories of updates. When Tim Bynum was
> HOWTO Coordinator, he listed whether the update was minor or major.
> This would of course go on the announce list. Authors could be asked to
> classify their update. This would make it easy on the volunteers. An
> update might be classified as minor, intermediate, or major. "minor" is
> where one corrects some mistakes such as typos, broken url links, and
> better clarity. A major update is where the whole document is read over
> and many changes made, including possibly adding new chapters, etc.
> Intermediate is somewhere in-between.
I'm not convinced that this would help to tell how out-of-date a
document is. There are some documents, like the Oracle7 HOWTO, which
probably haven't had, nor do they need a major re-write, since they
cover a specific version of the software. I'm certain that there are
some other HOWTOs for which this metric is inaccurate. Having 3 dates
to look at could also prove to be a hindrance, if you want to quickly
evaluate the age of a document.
Greg
Please don't copy me on replies, I'll take my answer on the list.
