discuss: Re: vlist wildly inaccurate
Subject:
Re: vlist wildly inaccurate
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
15 Jul 2004 19:40:00 -0000
Message-Id: <20040715192458.GA718@davespc>
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 12:35:10PM -0400, V. Alex Brennen wrote:
> I really don't want to get into a language debate with you
> this isn't the right list for that. I just want to share
> my very bad experiences and I want the LDP to be aware that
> there are major design problems with the wiki stuff that's
> out there and they may be getting themselves into a major
> time investment to try and get and keep a wiki stuff working.
Besides possible security problems there's also the problem of access
control. It would be nice if each person on the volunteer list could
only modify the blurb about themselves. But I don't think the wikis are
that sophisticated. People may be reluctant to modify descriptions of
what other people do. I'm supposed to be maintaining the manifesto.
But I can't do it alone since it's serves as our constitution or
by-laws. Last time I posted re proposed changes, no one responded.
I'll try again soon (I hope).
So even if wiki were to work fine technically speaking, there would
still be problems. Remember when Poet put his own ads (masquerading as
announcements) on our site. Could this (or other misuse) happen with a
lot of people having access to wikis? Maybe not if someone maintains
it, but that someone could also just fully maintain it alone without it
being a wiki.
Also, what about the various markup languages used for wikis? Some are
as hard to learn as LinuxDoc (although I claim LinuxDoc is simple to
learn) but not nearly as powerful. I just read the man on "parsewiki"
which converts a marked-up text doc (presumably a wiki) into html or
DocBook. The markup language is a little hard to learn while being
inferior to LinuxDoc. It also seemed to have a bug which I'm not going
to report as I don't like the markup language design: <tags> mixed with
*** or ''' or == type tags, etc. Keeping all tags inside of
<angle-brackets> (like LinuxDoc or DocBook) is a cleaner and clearer
design.
> We have the repository and mailing lists to collaborate and
> a set processes for collaborating on the authoring of HOWTO's.
> A wiki doesn't really fit this project, in my opinion.
I questioned the proposed use of wiki years ago.
[repeat]
> it would be better spend writing and reviewing documentation.
And also creating some kind of a database for docs as David Merrill was
attempting with lampadas/plone. This would have been something like a
wiki. But it seems reasonable to give each author access to change the
status of their doc such as seeking a new maintainer.
David Lawyer
