On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
It can hardly be simpler than what it already is. Introducing an
explicit version control cycle (because commits are exactly that) might
seem relatively simple (or even totally natural) for somebody (all of us
if we are committers) that is used to it but might not be for users that
simply want to give some help.
As Jeff brilliantly put it on the forrest-dev list: users don't rant,
they quietly leave.
Here, you could say: users don't complain about how hard the
documentation system is, simply they don't use it to contribute.
Between having a smarter diff-sending algorithm transparently do the job
on the users behalf and an explicit commit cycle, I'd go for the first
even if it removes only *one* step, it might be a difference between 100
people using the wiki and 150, 50 of which are scared by the concept
of 'committing'.
Paint me PITA, but I think it's worth playing devil's advocate on this
muddy ground.
We use JSPWiki in our company together with the Hula server (can't
remember the URL but Google will know it) which checks a Wikipage
(NotificationList in our case) that users can put their address and
notification time into it and get a mail with the diffs of the last 24
hours (if there are any). That's IMO the Wiki way of notification for
interested users.
Giacomo
