Re: Should we start a Guix users wiki?

[Craig Barnes <cjbarnes18@gmail.com>]

On 08/09/15 15:37, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Craig Barnes <cjbarnes18@gmail.com> skribis:
>>
>>> Some time ago I asked on IRC about a guix users wiki.  Someone suggest
>>> that I propose one here (sorry it's taken so long).
>>>
>>> I think that a wiki would be a good complement to the manual, which
>>> while quite complete, lacks exhaustive examples (which would be
>>> impractical).
>> I have mixed feelings.  There are several issues with a Wiki: one can
>> hardly know which version of the software it’s talking about (whereas
>> the installed Info pages of PDFs necessarily match the installed
>> version), and more importantly, it tends to be disorganized,
>> unmaintained, and often misleading.
In order to make sure that examples in the manual aren't broken,
wouldn't something equivalent to python doctests be necessary to ensure
this? I think it would be worse to have a broken example in the manual
than somewhere else.  If the number of examples grow this could be
equally unmaintainable.
> Agreed.  There are a small handful of highly successful wikis, but most
> of them are as Ludovic describes.  Maintaining a good wiki requires a
> great deal of work by experts to monitor changes, fix things up, and to
> update the wiki as needed when Guix is updated to avoid giving users
> outdated advice.  I suspect it only makes sense when the scale of the
> documentation and the number of people involved is at least two, maybe
> three orders of magnitude greater than the Guix project.
>
>> I would strongly encourage people to help fix the manual as a first
>> step.  If information that a user deems useful is missing from the
>> manual, then it’s a bug.  I’m willing to make it as simple as possible
>> to fix the manual.  But really, the manual should have all the examples
>> necessary for people to understand how to tweak things.
> I agree with Ludovic.  The manual would require far less work from our
> small pool of experts to maintain than a wiki, and has a couple of
> inherent advantages:
>
> * the manual is stored in the same git repository as Guix itself, so
>   they can be kept in sync at all times.
>
> * the manual can easily be read and modified while offline.
>
>> There might be cases where specific information doesn’t quite fit in the
>> manual, like, say, instructions for a specific laptop model.  These
>> could go in a wiki.
>>
>> Overall, I think it’s fine to have stuff at
>> <https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/> for instance, but the manual
>> should clearly remain the primary source of documentation, without any
>> ambiguity.
Thank you for your feedback on this, I agree with your points, and that
in this case the manual is the better place for this information.

Going back to my original problem of finding information that isn't
currently in the manual, it would be great if there where an easier way
to search / browse the mailing list archives.  This would make
extracting great examples to add to the manual easier.  Any suggestions
would be appreciated.


Cheers

Craig