[darcs-users] Theory of Patches

[Eric Kow]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 14:16:37 +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Perhaps some of these can be combined so that at least they are on the  
> same website. Though I don't see why the wiki, the wikibook and camp  
> cannot be combined.

Being a work in progress, camp should probably be left to evolve on its
own.  They need access to lots of fancier tools, in particular, LaTeX
for math typesetting and Coq for proving things (with an interesting use
of what seems to be Literate Coq).  It doesn't stop us from grabbing
bits and pieces from them as time goes on, for example, the more stable
parts of its terminology.

The wiki and wikibook could probably be merged (with some minor
licensing and technical hurdles to overcome).

> Oh no, it's fine, I like where you are going with this. And maybe I can  
> contribute something. For example, have you given any thought to using a  
> content management system like Drupal?

...

> Another example: If the Camp guys want to have a section dedicated to  
> them that other people can't write to, you can give them that.
>
> A Drupal site will also have a menu, a side-bar, pretty URLs and stuff  
> like that to make navigation easier. Navigation is one of the things  
> that (IMHO) wikis are not very good at.

Believe me, I can definitely understand the appeal of superior
navigation and I appreciate the work you've put into setting up
the test Drupal instance: http://darcs.daniel.carrera.bz

But here's the bigger picture.

First: a lot of us tend to value being able to edit things in our
favourite text editors without having to copy and paste things from a
web browser window, and (eventually) being able to version control all
of our data (gitit) are key features.

Second: in the community we're already making several technological
transitions (from autoconf/make to cabal, from moinmoin to gitit, from
LaTeX to RST).  We're really not in a position to deal with yet another
leap.  At this stage, we need to rest a bit, by focusing on darcs
hacking and finishing what transitions we've started.  By the way, the
current demo of gitit may not be so good.  Try
http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/ instead.

I don't mean to dampen your enthusiasm, but can we set the CMS
discussion aside for now and focus on the documentation itself?  I
realise this leads to crappy navigation, but I'll consciously accept
that cost to avoid paying the other costs.  (This also gives you the
time to build a more solid case for a CMS as you master the darcs
documentation, using concrete problems from what we have).  We've had a
lot of these kinds of discussions lately, so I'm very much in a
"satisfice and move on" mood, i.e. take something that's "good enough"
instead of trying for the best possible solution...

So speaking of moving on: what is the first thing you would tackle?
Perhaps the first step is for you to survey the documentation we have?

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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