Justin Couch wrote:
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. :)
Oh yeah. Good point. Never mind that one.
Still, I think once a week for something that doesn't change that much
is more of a reminder that most need, but that's my opinion/problem and
not the group's. My original itch was that I'm very interested when a
new tip or other info tidbit is available, and would like to know when
that happens. Since you pointed out the CVS access to the FAQ I'll just
do it myself.
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 judgment 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.
That's a fair judgment call on your part. I'm in the camp that
interprets the "frequent" part of FAQ very liberally, even to a
speculative extreme: if it's a good question (perhaps one that has never
been articulated so well), and a very good answer has been provided, I'd
throw it in the FAQ. The probability of harm is low, certainly lower
than the probability that it might be useful to someone else.
Just going over your specific items that you've listed here:
<snip>
My point in providing a list wasn't for you to defend them... I hardly
did an extensive search myself (I guess I should have; I certainly
didn't want you to waste time tracking them down). My point was
basically that there are subjective "classes" of questions that come up
with some frequency, and there must be some identifiable reason that
they do. Many of those reasons are probably outside our sphere of
control (e.g. JavaDoc is incomplete, or bug in release, or not enough
RTFF, etc.). I'm just publicly wondering if there is something with
either the format or the process by which the FAQ is contributed to and
communicated that could be improved to increase the inherent value of
the FAQ. It /is/ possible I'm intellectually living on Pluto, but my gut
was saying that others must also relate to the subjective sense that
more traffic could be addressed better by the FAQ, and that *really*
good tips/tricks could be better archived (which IMO is a valid use of
the FAQ).
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
I just don't want to presume that you'd be interested in supporting any
additional demands that may be collectively deemed as desirable in the
FAQ (and include here the caveat that someone else cares about this).
I'm glad to hear that you're not having to slave away to keep the FAQ in
order. :-)
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.
And a completely fair judgment call on your part. As I said, I'd
probably err on the side of including too much rather than being
conservative about it *as long as* a comprehensive answer has been
provided. I'm certainly not interested in a repository of unanswered
questions or incomplete answers.
I'd also point out that some people may spend more time answering new
questions if the response had a good chance of ending up in the FAQ
(both for recognition sake, and to know that they'd never have to answer
it again, other than saying "RTFF").
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.
(JGO? Again, I may be from Pluto...)
I stand corrected. I just /felt/ like the number of messages had
increased in the last 6 months, but certainly didn't have anything to
substantiate it. But that's not relevant to my point...
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,
<snip>
I checked it out and noticed the mix of style and content. The
<question>/<answer> delineation is the most important here... I'm
intrigued enough that I may play around with it, if nothing else to get
the diffs I'm interested in.
XSLT is not
particularly good at doing this multi-document handling in our
experience. :(
ditto :-[
(actually I'm not even sure you can get
XSLT to create multiple output documents from a single source document).
(I've not figured out how to do that either, save possibly a hack via a
Xalan extension.)
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.
I disagree, but that's subjective and not really debatable. It's a
matter of working style, I guess (and emacs serves me well in this
area). I like having a TOC of all the questions up front, and also being
able to easily search and browse all content. But in all honesty it's
just a neurotic pleasure I get from standards (official or ad-hoc)
compliance. :-P Given the CVS access you provide and a little time I can
take care of my neurosis in private :-)
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.
I'm not arguing that the whole FAQ get posted (as many Usenet groups do
every month, since they don't have an associated web site), just some
way of knowing what's changed since the last mail message. :-)
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.
And I'll subscribe to "code-website" from [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
see if I can postfix some hack to address this itch for diffs that I have.
That being said, I'd ask that you consider being less conservative when
it comes to including something in the FAQ. Would it be helpful if more
people voiced their opinion when they see a question answered and think
the exchange deserves to be included?
Thanks,
Simeon
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