Re: speculations to characterize issues for Debian Enterprise
"Jesús M. Navarro" <jesus.navarro@undominio.net> writes:
> On Tuesday 24 August 2010 21:41:56 Russ Allbery wrote:
> [...]
>> I personally admit to using traditional wikis only grudgingly, since
>> I'm not fond of the process of editing documents in a web browser, or
>> in an editor spawned from a web browser. But as mentioned above, I'm
>> not sure I'll have much time to do things beyond try to release our
>> internal documentation and comment on the mailing lists, so that's not
>> necessarily something to take into consideration.
> Humm... I always thought the same but in practice I think the wiki
> advantages surpass the limitations specially for sites where systems
> administration depends on a team instead of a "solo show" (and that's
> the case for most enterprisey environments).
I agree that one needs something like that.
What we do internally is use ikiwiki with a Git backend. I never touch
the web pages: I don't edit them, and I don't look at them. I read the
files in Markdown in the Git repository and edit them in the same place.
If other people on my team want to use the web pages, they're there, but I
don't have to deal with the annoying web editing interfaces.
> I used Trac in the past with success due to its
> documentation/tasks/configuration integration: you can go for the "whys
> and whats" in the wiki where pointers to files, transactions,
> etc. within the source management tool self-explains the "hows" and
> tasks integrate all of that in the way of very simple but useful
> "howtos".
I've used Trac for some software projects, and it has some nice features,
but having to edit the pages in a web browser would personally drive me
nuts and lead me to largely stop writing documentation. Writing
documentation is hard; I want to have as few psychological barriers in the
way as possible, and making it a web page adds a significant psychological
barrier for me. But that's just me, and I suspect that I'm increasingly
unusual in an era where all the people entering the workplace have grown
up editing things on web pages.
One of the things I particularly like about ikiwiki is that it gives you
both worlds.
> Add a "me too" to this. I think that if Trac (or a Trac-like) offered
> its wiki from text files stored at the source management tool (specially
> for easy versioning and tagging but in order to make it easy for
> off-line edition) it would make for a terribly powerful IT operations
> tool. Can anyone point to such a beast?
ikiwiki is the best that I've seen, but doesn't offer all the features of
Trac in terms of integration with a source code repository and bug
tracking system.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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