Re: Working for free [was: Offensive variable names]
On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 12:53:00PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> For what it's worth - I had a check on IRC in debian-www
>
> The wiki isn't as tightly policed and is more of a free for all: if you see
> something that's wrong, you can change it. There's a creative tension between
> what should sit on the wiki / what should be on www.debian.org.
>
> I also had a quick chat with Paul on IRC
>
> He'd forgotten about the change: it was that long ago. He did make the point
> that it seemed sensible to centre it on SourcesList for him: it's no huge
> matter since anything can be changed.
OK. Thank you for all of that.
I don't know how others approach it, but for me, the wiki is the place
where end users like myself can contribute with our own knowledge
and experience. www.debian.org is the "official" information source,
centrally controlled, curated, and off limits for the end users.
The two sites borrow from each other as needed. This is fine. There's
no need to prevent duplication of content. In a worst case scenario,
if one of the two sites is unavailable for some reason, the other one
is a backup. In more ordinary situations, the two sites have different
organizational structures and different focuses, so specific pieces of
information may be easier to find on one site than on the other. That's
also fine.
> Each set of release notes also has the sources.list stanzas in it, I think,
Not that I can find. And I just looked.
> and if you're coming from updating older releases, you'd be looking to the
> next set of release notes anyway to see what's changed, ideally.
As a regular on the #debian IRC channel, I can assure you that "what
do I put in sources.list for ___ release" really *is* one of the most
frequently asked questions.
There are several reasons for this, and I don't claim to know all of
them, but one of the biggest reasons is that a large number of Debian
installations do not provide a working Internet sources.list file. Perhaps
because the network interface(s) were not working during installation,
perhaps because of missing wifi firmware, yadda yadda yadda. The point
is, people *need* this information. Having multiple redundant copies of
it is helpful.
Another big reason only applies to the older releases. "I have an old
server running ___ and its sources.list doesn't work any more. What do I
use?" This is unbelievably common, and it obviously isn't going to be
covered by reading the wheezy (or whatever version's) release notes.
> There Is No Cabal - this isn't quite Wikipedia with policies, edit wars
> and badged issues police, at least as far as the wiki's concerned.
> www.d.o is a bit tighter - not least because well-intentioned edits cause
> havoc with the good folk who do translations and there's a defined process
> so that they don't end up having to re-edit tens of pages for a tiny fix
> on a URL, for example. [Been there, caused that, got the T shirt]
OK. I'll admit that I may have been over-sensitive, because I have been
on the receiving end of an extremely vicious wiki cabal in the past, with
a different community and a different wiki. So I may have extrapolated
patterns that don't exist, here, from a single incident.
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