discuss: output tree wrangling (website content overhaul); archive proposal
Subject:
output tree wrangling (website content overhaul); archive proposal
From:
"Martin A. Brown" ####@####.####
Date:
19 Mar 2016 00:41:44 +0000
Message-Id: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1603181637280.12423@znpeba.jbaqresebt.arg>
Hello all,
I have been working through our output directory (the filesystem
underneath http://www.tldp.org/) to try to understand what is
present and what changes would be necessitated by automated
publication of HOWTOs and guides (and the refs and faqs), from our
git repository.
More findings and thoughts....
* There are many renamings, for example, 'ppp-ssh' has become
'VPN-PPP-SSH-HOWTO' and (embarassingly, as I contacted the
author claiming it wasn't on our site) 'intro-linux' should be
named 'Intro-Linux' to match the name in the source tree.
I plan on providing some polite HTTP user-agent redirection to
the newest name of these older documents. This will be
accomplished with this familiar trick and a bit of text. (I
tried it out and 2 seconds is long enough for a human to see the
text, but short enough to not be unusually intrusive.)
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL='$NEWURL'" />
My suspicion? Thoroughly uncontroversial.
* Some of the documents in the output tree have been retired
and/or moved many years ago. Where there's a redirection
already in place for a document, I plan to drop the redirect.
* Acer-Laptop-HOWTO
* Linux-From-Scratch-HOWTO (see more on LFS below)
* Distributions-HOWTO
* MIPS-HOWTO
* 3Dfx-HOWTO
* PostgreSQL-HOWTO.html
My suspicion? Thoroughly uncontroversial.
(The newest of the above redirects was installed in 2005, so I
don't think there should be much dissent, at least, not on the
part of those who had written the original documents and moved
their content to a separate location more than ten years ago.)
* Archive candidates: there are some documents which are very,
very old, for example one on Sendmail+UUCP and another on an old
serial card, the GTEK-BBS-550. These deserve to be held in our
archive forever. Some of these are so old that we do not have
the sources in our version control system.
I hope this is uncontroversial.
See proposal.
* Archived data: we already have an archived set of data, stored
under http://tldp.org/pub/Linux/docs/. To my knowledge, there
are no links directly to this documentation and these elements
of the history of Linux.
See also below proposal.
Archive proposal:
-----------------
I propose (and will volunteer to undertake some of the effort) to
write a DocBook XML document that provides a human-curated index to
a partial store of archived documents we maintain in our document
root [0]. The goal would be to provide some context around what
this stuff is, who created it and why, and provide links into the
historic matter.
I would welcome any others who wished to help examine some of this
older content.
If nobody objects in a week or so, I will probably start on this
project, while continuing on the output tree reorganization and
cleanup.
Future ideas:
-------------
Documentation of various sources could be hosted on TLDP even if
not in our version control system.
For example, the Linux From Scratch project is wonderful and
interesting. The content is great stuff. Our source repository has
an old version (5.0) of the LFS book (which was first seen in the
TLDP repo on 2000-04-26 as the Linux-From-Scratch-HOWTO). The
current version of the LFS book, though, is 7.9.
I'm not doing anything with the idea yet. This brings up the idea
(yet again; this is not new) that it would be nice if TLDP could
provide a facility for checking out remotely maintained
documentation sources furnished by third parties, in this case LFS,
and build that into our hosted and mirrored output tree. A laudable
goal!
If we were to do this, I'd think we would want to be able to be able
to checkout (or clone) the documentation from whatever remote
version control system was in play, put the files into an
appropriately-named directory and fire-off a job to process the
documentation automatically into a separate area of the output tree.
Stuff from our VCS Would end up here:
https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/... -> http://www.tldp.org/en/
Stuff from another VCS Might end up here:
hg://another.id/ERF/ERF-HOWTO -> http://www.tldp.org/hosted/
There would clearly be some work and, especially coordination
involved here, but for anything that was Linuxdoc, Asciidoc
or one of the DocBook formats popular in the last 15 years, we could
probably handle.
Anyawy, I'm going to retain focus on cleaning up our existing output
tree first, engage the metadata management question, and then maybe
work on the hosted documentation concept. Unless, of course,
somebody else beats me to it!
That's all from here,
-Martin
[0] http://tldp.org/ls-lR.txt
--
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/