[darcs-users] ship the wiki ?

[Mark Stosberg]

There's been the goal to incorporate "stable" parts of the wiki into the 
official manual. In practice, this happens very little. (I just adding 
"Converting from Subversion to the manual, which was existed on the wiki 
for a long time).

The wiki is a lot easier to edit, with a syntax that is documented right 
on the edit page. Editing the official manual means editing Latex. While 
it's not particularly difficult, I can't see it ever being as easy as 
the wiki.

Considering the wiki is full of valuable documentation itself, should we 
consider shipping the wiki somehow, so people can use that documentation 
offline?

The MoinMoin wiki software use has a special feature, in that someone 
has a made a version designed to run on desktop computers. It would be 
possible to write a script that automates grabbing the pages from the 
official wiki, bundling them this way, and shipping a working wiki that 
people could use offline.

That could be a bad idea, because it's a little complicated, and it 
might encourage people to edit their local wikis instead of contributing 
to the central one.

A far simpler route would probably to take a snapshot of the wiki as 
rendered HTML, and ship that as static pages. That would use no special 
desktop technology and send people back to the central wiki to contribute.

While both options are interesting to consider, the larger question is 
whether to bother at all, considering how common network access seems to 
be.

So ask you, other darcs users: If darcs shipped a copy of the wiki as 
part of the documentation-- would you use it? Or is visiting 
http://wiki.darcs.net/ good enough for you?

   Mark