discuss: Thread: [questions] WikiText format; Bugzilla-Guide; unpublished; suggested renaming

Hello all,

I have a few questions:

  1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
  2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?
  3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
  4. Propose renaming of some templates.


1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
We have exactly one WikiText document (out of 501 active documents) 
in our source repository, the howto/wikitext/WikiText-HOWTO.

What should we do with this WikiText document?

David Merrill, our illustrious former leader, seems to be the author 
both of this document and of a perl module backing the CLI utility, 
wt2db (WikiText to DocBook).

Should this be enqueued to the discussion of our future list of 
supported formats?

For now, I'm ignoring this single document.

[Since the time that TLDP supported wiki markup and today, there has 
been a proliferation of markup languages. AsciiDoc, reStructuredText 
and Markdown have overtaken WikiText for general applications, 
although WikiText seems to dominate the ... wiki ... spaces.  Thank 
you, Captain Obvious.]


2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?
----------------------------------------

We have a very old version of the Bugzilla Guide, which treats 
Bugzilla version 2.16.3.  The Bugzilla folk are now at version 5.0 
or something and they have a comprehensive set of documentation 
online.

I propose that we retire the guide/docbook/Bugzilla-Guide.

[If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this.]


3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
------------------------------------------------------------

We have several unpublished source documents.  A few of them, I 
believe are quite high quality (Intro-Linux and 
Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO).  I will also observe that one of 
my owns documents (linux-ip) is also unpublished on tldp.org today.

I propose contacting the authors and asking each if s/he is 
interested in having the documentation published on tldp.org.

  Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO
                         (howto/docbook/Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO)
  Consultants-Guide      (guide/docbook/Consultants-Guide)
  GNU-Build-System-HOWTO (howto/docbook/GNU-Build-System-HOWTO)
  Intro-Linux            (guide/docbook/Intro-Linux)
  linux-ip               (guide/docbook/linux-ip)
  Linux-Networking       (guide/docbook/Linux-Networking)
  rpmupgrade             (howto/docbook/rpmupgrade)
  Tuning-Linux           (guide/docbook/Tuning-Linux)

[If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this.]


4. Propose renaming of some templates.
--------------------------------------
We have sample docs of several formats.

I propose renaming these:

  big-howto-template-ld.sgml -> Template-Linuxdoc-Big-HOWTO
  small-howto-template-ld    -> Template-Linuxdoc-Small-HOWTO

I propose also renaming these two DocBook SGML/XML documents and 
switching them to DocBook XML 4.2:

  Template-Big-HOWTO         -> Template-DocBook-Big-HOWTO
  Sample-HOWTO               -> Template-DocBook-Small-HOWTO

[If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this, as well.]

That's my update for now,

-Martin

-- 
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/

Thanks Martin.  For simplicity sake I’ll answer your questions with my thoughts.

> On Feb 2, 2016, at 3:12 PM, Martin A. Brown ####@####.#### wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I have a few questions:
> 
>  1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?

Does pandoc work with this?  If so, let’s keep it.

>  2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?

Sounds fair to retire.  Maybe make a stub pointing to the official Bugzilla documentation?

>  3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?

Yes.  If we don’t hear from them in a reasonable time, we can treat it as an abandoned document.

>  4. Propose renaming of some templates.

No objection.

-Mark

Hello Mark (et alia),

>>  1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
>
>Does pandoc work with this?  If so, let’s keep it.

Good question.  I don't know.  The WikiText format stays in limbo 
until we solve the 'supported formats' question.

I'll enqueue, as a task, your question about pandoc.

For me, this is lower priority than my current queue, but, I'll not 
lose this thought.  Thanks for bringing it up.

Of course, if somebody wants to test out pandoc and report 
success/failure of format conversions to the list, I can use that as 
a starting point.

>>  2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?
>
>Sounds fair to retire.  Maybe make a stub pointing to the official 
>Bugzilla documentation?

OK, good thought.  I'll get that ready.  We can put one of those 
wonderful sneaky little META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH critters in place 
for that document (along with maybe a very brief explanation of the 
deprecation).

>>  3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
>
>Yes.  If we don’t hear from them in a reasonable time, we can treat 
>it as an abandoned document.

OK.  I'll enqueue that, also, as a task.

If anybody wishes to help here, just let me know.  I'll track the 
communications for now.

>>  4. Propose renaming of some templates.
>
>No objection.

OK, great.  This one seems rather less controversial.  So, I'll 
probably handle this before some of the others.

Thanks for the feeback, Mark.

-Martin

P.S. And, thank you, as well, jdd...message received!

-- 
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/

On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 12:12:40PM -0800, Martin A. Brown wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I have a few questions:
> 
>   1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
>   2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?
>   3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
>   4. Propose renaming of some templates.
> 
> 
> 1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> We have exactly one WikiText document (out of 501 active documents) 
> in our source repository, the howto/wikitext/WikiText-HOWTO.

This was likely intended to be for our never-implemented lampadas project
CMS.  But WikiText may mean any wiki format, and the wiki used by
Wikipedia, Mediawiki, claims it uses WikiText. But the Wikitext proposed
by David Merrill is not the same as Mediawiki.  So it seems that WikiText
has different meanings and the Merrill WikiText might just be a never-used
dialect only used by (or invented by) Merrill (I don't know for sure).

> 
> What should we do with this WikiText document?
> 
> David Merrill, our illustrious former leader, seems to be the author 
> both of this document and of a perl module backing the CLI utility, 
> wt2db (WikiText to DocBook).
He was never our leader, but did a lot of (unrealized) coding for LDP.
wt2db is sort of a misleading name, because Merrill said to use DocBook
tags inside the wiki (if there was no wiki-markup for what you wanted)
which makes conversion to DocBook trivial for such cases of markup.

> 
> Should this be enqueued to the discussion of our future list of 
> supported formats?
No.  See above.
> 
> For now, I'm ignoring this single document.
> 
> [Since the time that TLDP supported wiki markup and today, there has 
> been a proliferation of markup languages. AsciiDoc, reStructuredText 
> and Markdown have overtaken WikiText for general applications, 
> although WikiText seems to dominate the ... wiki ... spaces.  Thank 
> you, Captain Obvious.] 

In the above, you seem to be using "WikiText" to mean any wiki format and
not the wiki format proposed by David Merrill.  But then since Wikipedia
is widely used and has about 30,000 editors that know the wiki markup used
there, I'm not sure that WikiText in the broad sense has been overtaken.
> 
> 
> 2. OK to retire very old Bugzilla-Guide?
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> We have a very old version of the Bugzilla Guide, which treats 
> Bugzilla version 2.16.3.  The Bugzilla folk are now at version 5.0 
> or something and they have a comprehensive set of documentation 
> online.
> 
> I propose that we retire the guide/docbook/Bugzilla-Guide.
> 
> [If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this.]
> 
> 
> 3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> We have several unpublished source documents.  A few of them, I 
> believe are quite high quality (Intro-Linux and 
> Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO).  I will also observe that one of 
> my owns documents (linux-ip) is also unpublished on tldp.org today.
> 
> I propose contacting the authors and asking each if s/he is 
> interested in having the documentation published on tldp.org.
> 
>   Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO
>                          (howto/docbook/Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO)
>   Consultants-Guide      (guide/docbook/Consultants-Guide)
>   GNU-Build-System-HOWTO (howto/docbook/GNU-Build-System-HOWTO)
>   Intro-Linux            (guide/docbook/Intro-Linux)
>   linux-ip               (guide/docbook/linux-ip)
>   Linux-Networking       (guide/docbook/Linux-Networking)
>   rpmupgrade             (howto/docbook/rpmupgrade)
>   Tuning-Linux           (guide/docbook/Tuning-Linux)
> 
> [If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this.]
> 
I suggest that these be reviewed before publishing.  There may be a good
reason why they weren't published.  The Consultants guide is likely
obsolete, by the Poet who was sort of exploiting LDP to make money.  It's
on his website at Command Prompt.  To get listed required a quid pro quo,
which I think meant that you agreed to receive email ads.  I recall doing
sampling of a Bash Howto and rejecting it, but I think it was the
"Advanced" one and not the one listed above.

Lack of metadata on these files means we don't know why they were not
published.

> 
> 4. Propose renaming of some templates.
> --------------------------------------
> We have sample docs of several formats.
> 
> I propose renaming these:
> 
>   big-howto-template-ld.sgml -> Template-Linuxdoc-Big-HOWTO
>   small-howto-template-ld    -> Template-Linuxdoc-Small-HOWTO
> 
> I propose also renaming these two DocBook SGML/XML documents and 
> switching them to DocBook XML 4.2:
> 
>   Template-Big-HOWTO         -> Template-DocBook-Big-HOWTO
>   Sample-HOWTO               -> Template-DocBook-Small-HOWTO
> 
> [If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this, as well.]
> 
> That's my update for now,
> 
> -Martin
> 
> -- 
> Martin A. Brown
> http://linux-ip.net/
> 
> ______________________
> http://lists.tldp.org/
> 
> 
			David Lawyer

Hello,

>> 1. What to do with WikiText format and our one WikiText document?
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> We have exactly one WikiText document (out of 501 active documents) 
>> in our source repository, the howto/wikitext/WikiText-HOWTO.
>
>This was likely intended to be for our never-implemented lampadas 
>project CMS.  But WikiText may mean any wiki format, and the wiki 
>used by Wikipedia, Mediawiki, claims it uses WikiText. But the 
>Wikitext proposed by David Merrill is not the same as Mediawiki.  
>So it seems that WikiText has different meanings and the Merrill 
>WikiText might just be a never-used dialect only used by (or 
>invented by) Merrill (I don't know for sure).
>> 
>> What should we do with this WikiText document?
>> 
>> David Merrill, our illustrious former leader, seems to be the author 
>> both of this document and of a perl module backing the CLI utility, 
>> wt2db (WikiText to DocBook).
>
>He was never our leader, but did a lot of (unrealized) coding for LDP.
>wt2db is sort of a misleading name, because Merrill said to use DocBook
>tags inside the wiki (if there was no wiki-markup for what you wanted)
>which makes conversion to DocBook trivial for such cases of markup.
>
>> 
>> Should this be enqueued to the discussion of our future list of 
>> supported formats?

>No.  See above.

OK.  We seem to be of the same opinion here.  I've moved that 
document into the 'retired' tree.  [Will push to tLDP github later.]

Also, thanks for the background.  I didn't know most of that.


>> 3. Unpublished source documents:  should we contact authors?
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> We have several unpublished source documents.  A few of them, I 
>> believe are quite high quality (Intro-Linux and 
>> Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO).  I will also observe that one of 
>> my owns documents (linux-ip) is also unpublished on tldp.org today.
>> 
>> I propose contacting the authors and asking each if s/he is 
>> interested in having the documentation published on tldp.org.
>> 
>>   Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO
>>                          (howto/docbook/Bash-Scripting-Introduction-HOWTO)
>>   Consultants-Guide      (guide/docbook/Consultants-Guide)
>>   GNU-Build-System-HOWTO (howto/docbook/GNU-Build-System-HOWTO)
>>   Intro-Linux            (guide/docbook/Intro-Linux)
>>   linux-ip               (guide/docbook/linux-ip)
>>   Linux-Networking       (guide/docbook/Linux-Networking)
>>   rpmupgrade             (howto/docbook/rpmupgrade)
>>   Tuning-Linux           (guide/docbook/Tuning-Linux)
>> 
>> [If nobody objects within a week or so, I'll do this.]
>
>I suggest that these be reviewed before publishing.  There may be a 
>good reason why they weren't published.  The Consultants guide is 
>likely obsolete, by the Poet who was sort of exploiting LDP to make 
>money. 

OK.  I've retired the Consultants-Guide.  [Will push to tLDP github 
later.]

> It's on his website at Command Prompt.  To get listed 
>required a quid pro quo, which I think meant that you agreed to 
>receive email ads.  I recall doing sampling of a Bash Howto and 
>rejecting it, but I think it was the "Advanced" one and not the one 
>listed above.
>
>Lack of metadata on these files means we don't know why they were not
>published.

Yes.  I perceive this as a core technical deficit.

-Martin

-- 
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/