I'm quite leery of using a new site (readthedocs.org), as it creates yet another platform for contributors to understand. Reducing the number of platforms has been a fairly clearly-stated goal of these recent conversations, as I've read it.
Despite agreeing that wikis are sometimes wonky, I thought of a solid reason against moving: we lose the Trac integration. A Trac wiki page can easily link to tickets and individual comments, and can use dynamic features such as lists of active tickets. These are useful and well-used features. I don't know what's best here, but thinking about the real loss associated with moving away from these features gives me pause. Richard > On Sep 27, 2016, at 5:58 PM, Michael Sloan <mgsl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 9:18 AM, Eric Seidel <e...@seidel.io> wrote: >> On Tue, Sep 27, 2016, at 09:06, Richard Eisenberg wrote: >>> Yes, I agree with Michael’s observations in the blog post. However, one >>> thing that’s easier about a wiki is that the editing process is much more >>> lightweight than making a PR. >>> >>> But GitHub has a wonderful feature (that I have rarely used) that >>> mitigates this problem. Viewing a file in GitHub offers a little pencil >>> icon in the top-right. It allows you to make arbitrary changes in the >>> file and then automates the construction of a PR. The owner of the file >>> can then accept the PR very, very easily. If the editor has commit >>> rights, you can make your edits into a commit right away. No need to >>> fork, pull and push. >> >> Indeed, GitHub also supports git-backed wikis, so you can have nicely >> rendered and inter-linked pages *and* have the option for web-based or >> git-based editing. Though, based on my limited experience with GitHub >> wikis, I wonder if they would scale to the size of GHC's wiki.. > > I agree, I don't think GitHub wikis are sufficient for GHC. We've > tried using GitHub wikis, and found that they were clunkier than just > having wiki / docs in your repo. GHC would probably want to have a > separate docs repo, as otherwise the commit history will get filled > with commits related to proposals, etc. > > It may be worth considering a similar approach with the GHC > documentation. We've had great success in stack with using > https://readthedocs.org/ . The way this works is that you have a > branch that readthedocs points at ("stable"), which provides the > current version to display. I realize that ghc would want to have > multiple versions of the docs up, but I'm sure that's feasible. > > Github itself has pretty nice markdown rendering, and the ability to > edit directly. Note that there is no GitHub lock-in here - it is just > a collection of markdown files, organized however you like them. > > The risk with such a migration is that the old wiki(s?) don't get > fully migrated and shut down. If that happens, then information will > be even more spread out and hard to find. Perhaps we can use pandoc > to automatically migrate much of the wiki content to markdown? It > probably will not be a lossfree conversion. > >> There's also a tool called gitit (https://github.com/jgm/gitit) that >> seems to offer the same set of features, but apparently with a more >> traditional (and I assume customizable) layout. >> >> I think having the option for simple, immediate edits or peer-reviewed >> edits (the peer-review is much more important to me than having an >> explicitly file-based system) would be a big win. Perhaps there's even a >> trac module that implements something like this? Then we could decouple >> it from the question/task of migrating the existing content elsewhere. >> >> Eric >> _______________________________________________ >> ghc-devs mailing list >> ghc-devs@haskell.org >> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs > _______________________________________________ > ghc-devs mailing list > ghc-devs@haskell.org > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
