Mr. Allen,
> I was wondering if the Doc Mailing list has talked about adding a "User
> Contributed Notes:" area to the on-line Manual.
<snip>
> I think this could help E-smith by doing something very similar. Plus it
> should be able to help the E-smith people updating their manual when the next
> release comes out.
For all the reasons you list, it is a very intriguing idea, and one that
I'll pass along to our web developers. I agree that it would be helpful
to both readers of the manual as well as ourselves when we go to update.
Having said that, it's not something that could be done short- or near-term.
The way the online manual works right now I generate the HTML pages from
my DocBook source document and copy them up to the staging web server
internally, where they are then rsynced to the production web server.
As time goes on and I make updates, I just run one script (now it is
actually a Makefile) that generates the files and updates the web site.
The good news is that this approach is: a) simple; and b) users are always
reading the most up-to-date version of the manual. I have been updating
the manual on a fairly frequent basis as new items are noticed.
The challenge with a comment system like the PHP site uses is that I would
effectively need to "freeze" the manual at a certain point, where it would
then be put into the system where people could comment on it... and then
really I couldn't update it until the next "major" release (at which point
many of the older comments would no longer apply). So it would be a
different way of working. Both have advantages. Both have disadvantages.
But it *is* something interesting to consider.
Many thanks,
Dan
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