Kevin Conder wrote: > > On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Mark Rages wrote: > > > > On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Kevin Conder wrote: > > > > > Can you look at it off-line (besides grabbing everything with > > > wget)? Can you print it out (besides one page at a time)? Can you search > > > it (besides using google on-line)? > > > > Wiki will lose Wabi-sabi if taken offline. ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi ) > > Some people don't have a persistent 24x7 connection to the > Internet. Personally, I pay for my own Internet access and am using a > dial-up connection. Sometimes it's just more convenient to read off-line > documentation. For example, I sometimes read documentation on a laptop > while riding the train. > > > > How about using DocBook instead? (http://www.docbook.org) That way > > > you can publish it into HTML, PDF, etc. Publish an HTML version and put it > > > on-line that floats your boat... > > > > > Your suggestions confuse me. Document formats and authoring tools don't > > address the problem that Wiki solves. > > Perhaps Wiki isn't the best solution then. I don't see how Wiki > addresses some basic needs: > 1. Able to be viewed off-line. > 2. Able to be conveniently printed. > 3. Able to be indexed and searched.
kevin, i understand your concerns, but i think you're missing something. the problem with ALSA afaict is that no one has been willing or found the time so far to write an extensive documentation, given the sheer size of that task. the wiki allows many people to add bits and pieces every once in a while, so that the work will be shared and people can just add their $.02 without taking all the responsibility and administrivia of writing a complete, stand-alone doc. we've been waiting for an easy-to-grok alsa doc (as opposed to RTFS or bare-bone doxygen) for quite a while now, and i'm really seeing the light in mark's wiki idea. it is *so* much better than nothing :-D to address your concerns: 1. mark, is the wiki output generated as plain html ? if yes, it should be trivial to offer a tarball for download. if it requires the wiki software to be installed on the user's machine, that would be a problem. 2. if your browser's printing function is not broken (which some are), just print. but you will lose the hypertextish features, of course. if you want eye candy or layout perfection, find someone to do the ugly work. 3. the linking is already very good in a wiki (links are bi-directional). if it does generate plain html, it should be trivial to add an ht-dig engine so that you can do full-text searches. of course, a shiny docbook manual of 500 pages is so much cooler in almost every way, but as long as no one's going to write it, we might as well stick to what we have. the rather heavyweight alternative you suggest will IMHO pose a considerable "barrier" on occasional contributors and will leave one person in charge of a huge task. > Wiki might be appropriate for Weblogs but I don't think it works > for technical documentation. Look, you asked if this would be an efficient > way to write such documentation. I don't think it is. but it is an effective way to *gather* documentation when there is none, or it is scattered. atm, there is no alternative it has to compete with, except for the doxygen, which serves different needs. but if you or somebody else here is on first-person terms with tim o'reilly, why not getting him to pay somebody to write "ALSA in a Nutshell" ? i'll pre-order today. :-D regards, jörn -- Jörn Nettingsmeier home://Kurfürstenstr.49.45138.Essen.Germany phone://+49.201.491621 http://spunk.dnsalias.org http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/ _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
