On Thursday, July 13, "Eli Zaretskii" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: David Vanderschel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> What I perceive as a forking of this sort of >> information is the Win32 stuff to be found in the >> Emacs Wiki. >That, too, is a less than efficient use of our scarce resources, IMHO. It has occurred to me that folks who contribute to the Wiki should be encouraged to reference material in the official manual and/or FAQ _whenever_ there is relevant documentation in either. (I.e., avoid duplication if at all possible and treat the documentation at the gnu.org site as authoritative.) To facilitate this, it would be helpful if the current FAQ could be accessed as HTML on the gnu.org site. There exist utilities to render an Info file as HTML, so this should be straightforward. Unfortunately, at present I do not know where to find an HTML version of the current FAQ on the Web. (The manual is already presented in HTML and it is replete with a high density of named anchor tags, so referencing subsections of it is no problem. I cannot figure out why this was not done for the FAQ as well. The plain text FAQ is pretty ugly by comparison - and it is not as useful for lack of live links.) When useful documentation appears in the Wiki and that documentation has no counterpart in the existing official documents, then it strikes me that there should be an effort to migrate that documentation into the official gnu.org tree after which it can be accessed by reference from the Wiki. >> This is the first call I have seen to completely >> abandon the Windows FAQ. If the problem is that it >> contains information which is no longer necessary or >> relevant, then cleaning the junk out should not be >> such a problem. >But why do that at all? We already have a FAQ in Emacs, let's >maintain the information in one piece, in one document. >> It appears that Eli is advocating >> merging what's left into the regular Emacs FAQ. >Yes! Actually, this sounds reasonable to me. If we can agree that something along these lines is the objective, then we could hope for a volunteer or two. Any of our "scarce resources" listening? What powers need to rule that someone representing the Windows port of Emacs should be allowed to work on the the official Emacs FAQ? I don't know how such efforts are managed. Could it not be that some of the useful Windows- specific stuff should really go in the manual? >> What >> concerns me about this is that the regular Emacs FAQ >> seems to be even farther out of date than the Windows >> FAQ. We could be talking about different things; but >> what I know to be the "Emacs FAQ" may be found here: >> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-faq.text >> And it says, "This is the GNU Emacs FAQ, last updated >> on 26 October 2001." >That's because the FAQ on the gnu.org site is for the _released_ >version of Emacs; it will be updated when Emacs 22.1 will be released. For the sake of those who contribute to the Emacs Wiki, it might be useful to have the development version accessible for cases in which the new one contains useful documentation that the current one does not. That would also help ease the transition when the new version is released. (It would also provide more eyes to note problems with the version under development.) I have my doubts about whether the FAQ on the Emacs Web site at gnu.org is current with the manual there. The manual says "it corresponds to GNU Emacs version 22.0.50." Regarding current released version, the Emacs page says "21.4 (stable) released on 2005-11-05". The FAQ says "last updated on 26 October 2001". None of these are consistent. It appears that the manual is newer than the current stable version and that the FAQ is much older. >But the up-to-date version of the FAQ comes with the Emacs >distribution, since the Emacs FAQ is part of the distributed Info >files. What do you care about outdated versions on the Web if you >have the latest and greatest at your fingertips? I don't. But I am still running v20.7 which was not even distributed with an Info file for its FAQ. (It does have a plain text FAQ file.) In any case, I have argued, in the spirit of avoiding duplication of effort, that up-to-date (and even anticipated) versions of both the manual and the FAQ should be available on the gnu.org Web site so that relevant portions of these official documents can be cited from the Wiki. Regards, David V.
