RFC: debian wiki
#include<hello>
using std::hello;
The Problem:
------------
In a recent discussion about the upgrade from potato to woody(?), the
discussion later rather went to a rant about the packaging-tools (apt, dpkg,
dselect) being too difficult to handle and nowhere explained as a whole.
Being also one of those who had - up to then - never used dpkg-reconfigure, I
thought about a possible solution to that problem.
The Idea:
---------
Please have a look at http://www.c2.com . The site contains the Portland
Pattern Repository, which is a buch of pages concerning programming-patterns.
The cool thing (imho) is that they make a good use of hyperlinks [1] to
emphasize the relation between the topics.
The Solution:
-------------
Consider the following three snippets of interlinked webpages:
Begin >>>>>>
The Debian-wiki:
[small intro]
- link:package management / (de-)installation guide
- link:configuration
- link:documentation
- link:troubleshooting
- link:w.d.o
Documentation:
Most packages have their documentation in /usr/share/doc/[packagename],
many others also have link:manpages or link:infopages. Some programs
runnung under link:X have their own builtin docs, to access these, look
for an entry 'help' in the menubar.
If you don't know what package a program comes from, try link:'dpkg -S' to
find the corresponding package.
Configuration:
In general, consult the link:Documentation for a package to find info about
the configuration of a package. Nonetheless, here are some guidelines:
On debian, there are only two places where the configuration of a package
can occur: in the global configuration directory link:/etc or the users
link:home-directory.
Some programs have conf-files in both, the one in the users
link:home-directory then often overrides the global settings in /etc.
Other ways to influence how a programs behaves is command-line arguments or
link:environment variables.
>>>>> End
If we could find a way to put the entry to this wiki[2] in the face of the
user, we would give them a startpoint for almost any question they encounter.
For developers (or rather documenters) this would also ease their task a lot
since integration in an external structure (as opposed to the internal
structure of the wiki) is often much harder.
The drawback is that this will never be printable, since printed docs
somehow require a linear structure and also translation will probably not be
as easy as for a 'normal' doc, where 1.4.5 is still 1.4.5 whether in French
or Chinese.
Uli
[1] The hyperlinks are not only used to recreate the order of a 'normal'
structured text, in fact there is no external structure at all in this
document. The document structures itself; any logically related topics are
often only one or two hyperjumps away from each other.
In fact all attempts to map the complexy of many systems to a 'normal' doc
are doomed to fail, some more, some less, because that would require
documents with much more than one dimension....
[2]: I'm not sure if wiki is an implementation or the general name for such a
repository, I didn't investigate the page at www.c2.com any further on that.
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