Re: www-master: Latest SVN or packaged version? (was: SVN finally fully enabled ...)

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 03:48:47PM +0200, W. Martin Borgert wrote:
> > The cleanest solution is to have the necessary tool-chain packages
> > backported
> 
> For me the cleanest solution is to use "officially" packaged
> documentation for our web pages, not some by-pass. This provides
> for public review of documentation _as packaged_, enables our
> users to install the documentation in exactly the same version
> as seen on our web pages, and does not suffer from not
> understanding "Build-Depends". Oops, I'm almost explaining,
> what's so cool about using a software package manager instead of
> "make install"/"make publish" ;~)

Except that this conflicts with the widely acknowledged concept of the
necessity of being able to rebuild everything from source, which is even
more logical in the case of documentation (since the source is so similar
to the final product, that you can actually read it :).

We've been building and publishing the manuals tree from source for years
now, and it has actually worked really well most of the time, allowing the
readers to enjoy the regular availability of the latest work online.
The idea of completely abandoning this now, just because a handful of
writers wanted to use a handful of latest and greatest software features in
the build process, but weren't prepared to do a stable backport or to find
someone to do it for them, would be an unnecessary regression IMO.

Besides, it means treating the documentation in packages as the canonical
version, which the web version needs to match, whereas, for a large and
increasing number of users, it's the other way around - they don't come
across the documents while trawling (20k-long) package lists, they get to
them via the web site, and often don't even know that the same documents
are also packaged, because that's of no interest to them.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.