On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mar 5, 2010, at 9:08 AM, Minh Nguyen wrote: >> I can see some advantages and disadvantages for introducing the two >> new classifications: FAQs, and Sage HOWTOs. >> >> Pros: All doctests in the above documents are regularly executed >> before each release. Having these HOWTOs and FAQs available with every >> Sage release means that one does not need to download them separately >> from various websites outside of the Sage infrastructure. For a binary >> distribution of Sage, all the standard documentation comes pre-built >> in HTML format. Another good thing (for the Sage website maintainers) >> is that the help and support page [15] would be less cluttered with >> miscellaneous documents. >> >> Cons: It would add some megabytes to the Sage source and binary >> distributions. Who is going to contribute time and effort to make this >> happen? I feel that I should not write such a long email if I'm not >> going to express my firm willingness to contribute to realizing the >> above proposals. As a first round of improvements that implements some >> of the above tasks, I'm willing to incorporate the FAQs into the >> standard documentation. I'm also willing to create the new category >> "Sage HOWTOs" and incorporate the following documents in it: >> >> * Python Functional Programming for Mathematicians >> >> * Number Theory and the RSA Public Key Cryptosystem [13] >> >> I wrote those two documents, so I'm more familiar with them than I am >> with the others. All I'm asking is that people contribute to the >> reviewing process. >> >> Thoughts?
Huge +1. I had decided long ago that I wanted something just like you propose above, and I really hope it happens sooner rather than later. The "testing" and "being available with Sage" pro's are really *huge*. They are especially useful for users not on the internet. By the way, if you look at the MATLAB distribution, it's about 3.3GB and most of that is documentation (including videos!). -- William > > The pros certainly seem to outweigh the cons for me. > > - Robert > > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
