On Apr 9, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Paul Beard wrote:

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On Apr 9, 2007, at 2:22 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

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Do we want to do that? Admittedly wikis are easier to edit. But wasn't the docbook format chosen for a reason? To those who remember: What was that reason? Does it still apply?

I think that was a reason I didn't/couldn't contribute to the docs a long time ago, IIRC. There was a reason for docbook, but it was one of those "the best is the enemy of the good" moments. Docbook is great is everyone can use it, but choosing a format that is mostly used by coders means that its use might be limited to coders whose time might be better spent coding. Mere civilians like myself can more easily add to the project if we don't set up barriers to entry like that.

Dockbook was chosen as the original format for the guide because of the myriad of formats we could output to from a single xml based source tree, at that time we were thinking about having html, pdf and who-knows-what-else incarnations of our guide. But the times have changed and I think we're well served with the dynamism of Wiki based documentation now and all that it has to offer (collaboration from non-coders certainly being high on the list). Therefore, hack on the Wiki everyone, says I! I've been promising to look at our trac permissions and adapt them to our current needs, so I'll try to get that done first so that a wider base can effectively contribute. In the mean time, as I first said in this thread, I'm very interested in seeing some work done on the TrackTicketing and InstallingMacPorts documents, I'm finding myself quite out of time these days to delve into them, so I'd appreciate it if anyone could give a hand (I believe they are of high priority, feel free to toss any other one into the mix). There are drafts for both of them up at our Wiki already, and all you ("you", the reader in general, not necessarily the ones on the headers of this message specifically ;-) need to do to improve the latter is merge what's already there with what we had on our OpenDarwin site, here in svn: http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/www/getdp/ index.php As for the former, TrackTicketing guidelines, there's no draft I can point you to to get an idea of what I have in mind for it... all of it is, as you may have guessed, in my mind ;-) So if you do want to work on it feel free to contact me personally so that we can talk it over. Regards to all! -jmpp