On Mar 6, 2020, at 22:16, Steve <riv...@braingia.org> wrote: > The first challenge is making the cookbook canonical, as in, The One > True Source for such things and then making Google or > Search_Engine_Of_Choice *find* and rank the cookbook. The other side of > that is that people will get half of the wrong information from > somewhere else before arriving at the cookbook.
This IMO is one of the fundamental obstacles facing the FOSS Community in general today. I call it the ‘It worked for me!’ syndrome. Yet, that very willingness —nay, eagerness— of knowledgable volunteers to help solve problems for perfect strangers is one of the key *strengths* of that Community as well. You can see it in action virtually every day here. It’s a dilemma that I doubt can ever be fully “fixed” (though having a well maintained cookbook that comes in on the top three results on the popular search engines would be a giant step towards that goal). The way that this is currently managed on the code side in Rivendell is that, while anybody can do anything they want with the code that is consonant with the GPLv2 license, changes that go into the ‘master’ branch at https://github.com/ElvishArtisan/rivendell (thence they eventually proceed to a subsequent ‘official’ release) must first be approved by the ‘Rivendell Architect’ —i.e. yours truly. I like to think that this is not because of dictatorial ambitions or other sinister motives on my part, but simply as a final sanity check to ensure not only correct technical operation but also consistency with the overarching design and ’style’ of Rivendell as a whole. I’m happy to say that it is relatively rarely that a pull request [request for a code change] has ever had to be dismissed out of hand. I’m wondering if a similar sort of workflow could be achieved with the Cookbook —i.e. a ‘beta’ version that any registered user could freely edit, changes to which could then be promoted to the ‘canonical’ site upon approval of one of a (necessarily small) group of ‘core' documenters. FWIW, I would be glad to serve as part of such a group. > Having more cooks leads to the third challenge: There is more than one > way to make lasagna. The way that I have Rivendell set up will have a > lot in common with everyone but will also have some nuances that I've > added based on local need or personal experience. If we all add our > "local need" and "personal experience" into the recipe, pretty soon > we're no longer making something consumable. A person new to Rivendell > won't know what to follow and we have a mess. This has been a central part of the UNIX culture since its very inception at Bell Labs in 1970. The way to manage it in a ‘cookbook' context is to maintain publicly a set of Best Practices (not unlike the style guides maintained by major national newspapers) and then use those as the basis for the approval decisions of the core documenters group. As always, one is free to manage Rivendell any way they want, but if one uses the Cookbook, one will get a necessarily opinionated (and consistent, and hopefully well thought out) ‘slant’ on how one goes about that. Cheers! |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer | | | Paravel Systems | |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed | | from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant | | minds. | | | | -- Frederick Brooks Jr. | | "The Mythical Man-Month" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|
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