[gst-devel] documentation wiki

[Zaheer Abbas Merali]

On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 12:22 +0200, Stefan Kost wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> YES, thats cool. I would like to see this integrated the main gstreamer website
> for several reasons.
> 1.) use it for the manuags (gstreamer-manual, pwg, faq)

This is the reason I started the wiki.  the manuals are incompletet and
have out of date information.  It is also obvious that very few people
are working on documentation, so providing a free-for-all web interface
to edit etc. is in my opinion better than having to get people to edit
docbook.


> 2.) use it for other pages like tasks

I agree with thomas regarding this.

> 3.) add a set of subpages ('gstreamer feature kitchen') where developers can
> form discussion subgroups.
> This would be very important to me. Therewith people can discuss video related
> stuff separatly from sound related stuff and so on. Further this is easier that
> using the mailing list as ideas are not splattered over dozen posting. Finally
> the media-wiki allows users to register and then watch pages. So one can easily
> stay informed.
> 

This is interesting, its worth guaging people's opinion on whether they
would use this.

> Zaheer: is there a lot of manual work included in committing the changes back to
> cvs and updating the wiki content from cvs? or can it be automated so that one
> only needs to review the changes in the wiki before commiting them?
> 

Yes there is manual work, the only thing automated is copy and paste.
Ideally it would be automated to as much as it can.  Mediawiki has
docbook export, so merging is made easier (but still requires manual
merging).

As Thomas said, I am only committing for a month.  If we can get a team
together all of whom know how to do the stuff, then I see it as
something that can be committed to.  However I am not willing to solely
maintain the documentation merging for say a year.  Stefan, if you are
willing to do stuff, and lets say 2 others then we have a good
likelihood of being able to commit to the wiki becoming integral to the
site.

Documentation is very important, but boring.  Coding is much more fun :)
So if we can get 4 ppl together to do this work, then we can be a
success and we have a documentation team with some super tools at our
disposal:

i) the docbook manuals
ii) the wiki
iii) the annotated/commentable api docs

Regarding merging to/from CVS, I looked at the commits we had to the
docs in the last month and it was very little.  So the merging from
docbook in CVS to wiki would be small.  The time I was going to propose
for wiki updates to be merged into CVS would be at freeze times (like
now).  That would allow us to hack on the code when everyone else can
hack on it without time being taken for merging.

Talking about the wiki, I only have a few more chapters left to import
in of the Application Developers Guide.  Then I was planning to sort out
all the cross refencing that is in the guide.  Johan, do you know of
anything in mediawiki that can automatically find where stuff is being
crossreferenced?

Take Care


-- 
Zaheer Abbas Merali <zaheerabbas at merali.org>