[darcs-users] Theory of Patches

[Trent W. Buck]

Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at theingots.org> writes:

> Trent W. Buck wrote:
>>> 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?
>>
>> Yes, and my thought is "no".  I can see the benefit of a CMS for, say, a
>> news agency or the PR arm of a large company.  I can't see any benefit
>> of a CMS for FOSS project with only a dozen regular contributors, of
>> which only two or three ever touch the user documentation.
>
> The first benefit is that a Drupal site will have nice navigation with
> a menu, a side bar, a nice professional-looking theme, etc. It'll be
> better for the user, and not any worse for contributors.
>
>> In my experience, CMSes are very hard to use (compared to editing source
>> files in a VCS),
>
> I think Drupal is very easy to use.

We'll just have to disagree on this point.

>> and they tend to have poor support for any output format other than
>> HTML.
>
> This is a legitimate concern. But we are talking about a website
> here. I am not suggesting that you replace TeX with Drupal.

We're talking about documentation.  It may be accessible from a browser,
but I don't think that's an adequate excuse to make it less accessible
from other media.

Specifically to replace our moinmoin wiki, we have been looking at
gitit.  This is a Haskell-based wiki.  It uses Darcs to store the source
documents, and Pandoc to generate a large number of output formats
(including LaTeX and ODT).  Users can edit text using a horrible
in-browser TEXTAREA, but they can also just "darcs get" the source
repository, and edit and compile it locally in their preferred editor.

Advantages for me are:

  - dogfood;
  - I can use Emacs;
  - I can generate nice printed output.

I believe these advantages far outweigh the benefits of having a
navigation bar and breadcrumbs and such.

>> I've also seen several CVE notices for moodle lately, which IIRC is the
>> basis for drupal (or is it the other way around)?
>
> What the heck?!!  No! Drupal and Moodle are totally unrelated.

Fair enough; sorry.

>> Contrariwise, my experience of CMSs, particularly those run by small
>> FOSS communities, is that they spend so much time pissing about getting
>> stuff like breadcrumbs working that they forget to produce any actual
>> content.
>
> Jesus, what CMS were you using?

I've no idea; I wasn't running those sites, I was trying to access them
(i.e. as a user).

> I can have a Drupal site setup with a nice theme and navigation and
> some basic configuration in 30 minutes.

I would rather you spent those 30 minutes improving the existing
documentation, rather than its "look and feel".