Simeon H.K. Fitch wrote:
Then how about we stop posting it to the list, and instead append the email to the "subscribe" email that new subscribers get when they join?
That would be fine with me, but I'm not connected in any way with Sun, and it's their list we're on here not mine. To get them to append stuff from an outside source as part of their official lists would probably cause their legal department nightmares for months on end. :)
A more important question is: "Why isn't it changing more often?" I don't mean this as a comment about your efforts, Justin, but an open question to the group. There are tons of questions each month that are repeats and also not covered in the FAQ.
I don't see that. I see some questions that are covered that come up maybe twice. Stuff that looks like it may become a future FAQ question I archive and wait to see if it comes up again. If it comes up within a month or two, then that gets targeted to add. If it takes another 6 months before it comes up again, then that doesn't count for the Frequent part of FAQ. Just because a question is repeated, doesn't necessarily mean that it's frequently asked. Deciding when something is frequent or not is really a judgement call. I hope that I've generally made the right call on these but there's always times where I haven't. From the old days, it has certainly cut down tremendously on the simple questions that used to abound on this list. Just going over your specific items that you've listed here:
1) Extracting projection matrix:
This comes up in many different forms. It's covered in the FAQ, but maybe not in response to that specific question. In the past people have asked about getting hold of the view frustum.
Create mpeg/mov/animated gif, etc.:
Answered in "How do I make video textures with JMF?"
SharedGroup vs. sharing geometry/attributes:
I don't see that as a question coming up reguarly at all. You see it many different variations like asking why SharedGroups cause performance problems or other things. The FAQ also points to the general Performance Guide that is written by the Sun engineers which cover these sorts of issues
Appropriate uses for Java3D's collision detection:
"How do I make two objects collide?" partially covers this. I thought I had another question in there about "Why doesn't the collision behaviors stop me from walking through an object" but can't see it immediately.
How to use textures with alpha channels and the effect of depth testing:
Covered in a number of different topics: "Objects don't appear in the 'right' order" "Transparency not working with multiple transparent objects" "How do I blend multiple textures together?"
(and my favorite) Where's Java3D for OS X?:
"What Platforms Does Java 3D Run on?" So, basically the issues that you have highlighted so far are generally covered, just maybe with different headings than you are looking for.
make it easier for these to be added to the FAQ, 3) reduce the maintenance work-load required of Justin (or whoever maintains the FAQ) to make all this happen, 4) make it easier to keep the FAQ updated and timely.
Maintenance workload is not really an issue unless you happen to hit me right in the middle of a major release of one of our products - which happens about once every 3 months or so. In general, I don't just stick a question in as soon as it is asked. I wait for it to be asked multiple times before it is deemed worthy of including in an FAQ. The Molasses treatment of this is deliberate so that we do pick what the right issues are to provide answers.
Again, this is not a criticism, but a call for discussion in hopes of making the good better. The volume of this group continues to grow,
Actually, it's remained pretty static for the last 2 or 3 years at around 2-2500 subscribers. Even with the starting of JGO, it has not really driven than many more people to this list or really even to comp.lang.java.3d.
XML is a benefit to this end! It would be quite simple to write an XSLT to convert the XML into a Usenet formatted FAQ file (plain-text) as well as HTML (gimme your DTD, and some example XML source and I'll do it for you).
Sure, fetch from CVS. The details found at http://www.j3d.org/cvs.html. There's a few things to deal with but the biggest one is the multi-document setup. The source XML is not a single file with every single question in it, there's many different files that map to one for each major section. That's why the XSLT work is a little harder than a simple mapping as to generate the text output such as you see posted here, you end up needing to read all the files in, process them to DOMs and then suck the headers out of each document etc. XSLT is not particularly good at doing this multi-document handling in our experience. :( Sure I could dump it into one large document, but that's much harder to manage and there are other down-sides to it. Each page is individually generated and keeps a date on the bottom for when it was last updated. You loose this ability with a single huge document as all the pages get created at once (actually I'm not even sure you can get XSLT to create multiple output documents from a single source document). Personally, I hate the usenet format as it produces huge files that are difficult to locate information in without the use of a decent text editor. This list has size restrictions which if you stuck the FAQ into a post would probably bump that (it was 100K IIRC). I much prefer just a simple short summary and let people wander to the web pages when they want the information, not when I decide to flood their inbox. So far, I think this approach has been appreciated because nobody's complained about wanting the full FAQ text posted to the list. One issue to consider in all this is that the FAQ gets posted more frequently to this list than the equivalent usenet FAQ, which is monthly. I was originally posting it monthly, but that didn't seem to help. It was only once the postings became weekly did we seem to be able to catch the newbies as they hit the group. One big post with all the details seems to work fine with long intervals between posts is fine, but when it's a weekly event, it can piss people off rather quickly.
Thoughts? Or am I the only one crazy enough to care about any of this?
Probably :) I think I get one query about every 6 months or so asking if I could have the post indicate something that has changed. I thought somewhere that I'd made some mods to include a Last Changed date in the header of the post, but looking at the last post, I don't see that. I'll have to take a look into it and find out what is going on. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
