[darcs-users] Review: improve front page of http://darcs.net

[Eric P. Mangold]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eric P. Mangold <teratorn at gmail.com> writes:
[...]
>> ] hunk ./doc/index.html.in 53
>>            <h2>Smart</h2>
>>
>>            <p>Originally developed by physicist David Roundy, darcs is
>> -          based on a unique algebra of patches. </p>
>> +          based on a unique <a href="manual/node9.html">algebra of patches.</a></p>
>
> This part sounds fine, as long as we're OK with referring to a page in
> the manual by number.  I'm a bit nervous about that, because rearranging
> the manual could cause node9 to become node3 or node12.  Is there a
> related article on the wiki which could be linked to instead?  Wiki
> articles have semantic names and are thus less likely to change.

There doesn't seem to be anything on the wiki that should be used in
this case. The only related thing I found was
http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsWiki/PatchTheory however it's nothing at
all like the "Theory of patches" chapter in the manual, and I
certainly would want to link to that wiki page straight off the front
page of darcs.net.

Being unable to cleanly link to pages in the manual is pretty crummy.
I had a look through the darcs source tree but I couldn't figure out
how the HTML is generated(?) Perhaps there is some way to switch it to
use names instead of numbers, or perhaps some way to automatically
produce a set of "named" pages that redirect to their "numbered"
counterparts.

So, can we go ahead with linking to manual pages as-is, or do we have
to figure out a solution before this patch can be applied?

-Eric M.