[svlug] GIOVANNI RE'S MODEST EVOLUTIONARY DOCUMENTATION PROPOSAL - Re: Understanding the problem... jor

[Don Marti]

begin Luke S Crawford quotation of Thu, May 06, 2010 at 11:04:59AM -0400:

> I mean, I like wikis;  that's how I document stuff at my own business.  
> But, if you don't have someone watching the dang thing, you /will/ have 
> a spam problem.

You also have the dreaded out of date free software
documentation problem.

I'm facing this right now in Python web development --
Google is your friend until the API changes, then all
the stuff that doesn't work on the current version
turns into info-poison.

You could get login-free editing using something like
the "fork this" functionality on GitHub.  Come up
with something that's relevant to the software on
example.org, and "git clone" the project's source
tree, either onto your own machine or onto a sandbox
machine somewhere.  Then edit a file under /doc, build
and preview the docs, and ask a maintainer to pull.

Ikiwiki maintains its docs in a wiki, and has some
good DVCS workflow for dealing with spam:
  http://ikiwiki.info/tips/spam_and_softwaresites/

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org