Kevin Oberman wrote:
On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Aristedes Maniatis<[email protected]> wrote:
Could I ask that someone with appropriate access rights review the state of
release documentation for 9.1 beta. It is very confused.
1. This page is the best information available:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/schedule.html
2. The link from the front page ( http://www.freebsd.org/ ) is labelled
"Upcoming: 9.1-BETA1" but goes to a page which is mostly about existing
releases, not the next release. http://www.freebsd.org/where.html#helptest
3. Clicking on the "view" link for the 9.1 information on that page takes
you to http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/9.1TODO which looks a lot like the
information in point [1] but wrong/old.
4. On http://www.freebsd.org/where.html#helptest there is a link to "FreeBSD
Snapshot Releases" for people interested in "FreeBSD-CURRENT (AKA
10.0-CURRENT)". But following the link takes you to a page where you get
linked to "9-CURRENT, 8-STABLE, 7-STABLE, and 6-STABLE" snapshots.
It is possible I'm just stuck in the past, but I've never been able to
navigate the 'new' bowling ball branded FreeBSD site nearly as well as the
older incarnation. And yes, I can eventually figure it all out... but this
information could be a whole lot clearer. I design information presentation
for a living, so perhaps I'm picky about these things, but I do think that
confusion could turn people away from my favourite operating system.
I'm happy to help if someone wants to enlist my assistance, but I don't
currently have any commit rights on this project.
RE has not done very well in updating this stuff for several releases.
RE is a very hard job and I understand that they are busy with both
9.1 and $REAL_JOB. I'd love for them to find someone whom they trust
and with reasonable clue to whom they could give the right to update
all of this stuff. It would still lag a bit, but it would be closer.
As far as what will be in 9.1, the doc tree was tagged for 9.1 two
days ago and can be downloaded from svn or cvs and built. Note that
it's all in sgml and you need to build the various formats. I'm not
sure when they will hit the web site and, of course, noting is
official until the release, but it is unlikely to change at this point
except for minor corrections.
Thanks Kevin
I think that perhaps the first job (when everyone isn't busy with releasing) is
to examine the relationship between the wiki and the website, make sure
everything is well organised, and make sure it is trivial to update by the
release people. Beyond that, the actual structure of pages within the website
doesn't make sense (to me) and isn't particularly clear from the home page.
Analysis of web logs might give some insight to what people are looking for and
viewing on the freebsd site (although of course, doesn't tell you what they are
just unable to find despite searching for it).
Over at Apache, the infra people have moved our project websites to a svn
pubsub approach which works well with the established user base of developers
who know svn. Updating pages becomes fairly trivial and a web rich text editor
interface means it is even easy if you are away from your regular toolset.
Whatever the process, it has to be easy enough that RE can fit it into their
workflow without additional burden.
Ideally, scripts could detect the release tags in svn and update the website
automatically.
Cheers
Ari
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