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Re: Debian documentation permalinks



On 30/05/12 12:29, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
 On 05/26/2012 09:09 PM, Philip Ashmore wrote:
 On 05/26/2012 06:53 AM, Jonathan Callen wrote:
 On 05/25/2012 10:03 PM, Philip Ashmore wrote:
 Hi there.

 First, here's what I'm talking about -
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink
 Unfortunately Wikipedia doesn't offer permalinks itself, so
 hopefully the above link won't "rot".

 And here's the permalink to the above article, as it was when the
 preceding post was made:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Permalink&oldid=483438630
 Or, if you prefer links that don't indicate where they're really going:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=483438630

 I'm happy and sad with this.
 Happy that Wikipedia provides permalink support.
 Sad that it didn't document it in its article about permalinks.

 Is there documentation on this feature somewhere?

 Permalinks, along with the fact that MediaWiki is free GPLv2, makes a
 compelling argument for moving Debian documentation to MediaWiki.

 Which documentation are you talking about? Most official documentation
 should have a fixed URL.

 If you are talking about the wiki: retrieving a fixed version from
 moinmoin is the same as in mediawiki.

 So I can't see a useful argument here, only FUD trying to talk people
 into using Mediawiki.

Hi there and thanks for your feedback.

I'm talking about the fact that Debian has mail archives that may include links
to documentation that has changed since the mail was written, possibly rendering
the mail thread misleading or nonsensical.

Any documentation system that can provide a means to refer to a specific version
(permalinks) would be better than what's there now.
This would
1. prevent link rot (moved documentation)
2. allow someone who finds an archived email that refers to Debian documentation
   to see the version being referred to, not the current version

In summary would be useful if Debian documentation included the names of the
versions it referred to, a permalink to the version you're reading, and some
way of indicating if an updated version is available.

I merely suggested MediaWiki as Wikipedia uses it.

From past experience I know that if you're documenting say a class library then
it helps if you use the same documentation style as the toolkit it's based on,
so you (and your readers) can focus on the contents and not the documentation
style itself.

By the way, this extends to man/info pages too, but as they're versioned, you
can refer to a specific version through the package version.

I still haven't figured out how to downgrade my installed packages to a
particular update date, i.e. "revert the upgrades I just ran, I had Sid enabled
by mistake".

This all goes to providing something that can be referred to after the fact.

Regards,
Philip Ashmore


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