Re: "waldschrotts guide to nifty references" - manualpage draft, version 0.9b

At 12:06 PM 8/21/00 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

At 21:54 21-08-00, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

I can see your point here, even though I don't think it's likely to happen. Sites like phpbuilder.com, zend.com and weberdev.com aren't

likely

to ever become members only. As far as reliability goes, they're much

more

reliable than php.net :)

Uh, phpbuilder didn't have any backups and just lost everything. That's not very reliable. I talked to Tim about this and he is fixing the situation, but that was a pretty bad example you chose. And php.net has been pretty stable lately. zend.com was down a couple of weeks ago because you guys were testing something and it was spewing errors. I don't see php.net being any less reliable than anyof the other sites out there.

zend.com was down for a total of approximately 4 hours (combined) since it's launch, disregarding networking problems of backbone providers - I have no idea where you took the 'couple of weeks' figure from. php.net had a couple of months when it was dying sporadically, and generally, it has much less maintenance than what zend.com or weberdev.com have (which is natural, considering it's a free server). It has been more reliable since it was replaced, though. "zend.com was down a couple of weeks ago" I did not say it was down for a couple of weeks.

I haven't read the whole thread so excuse me if I say stuff which has been said or say something irrelevant :) I don't see a real problem with having tutorials and stuff in the manual. I don't see that server availability is a big issue as all major PHP sites will in any case have an online version of the manual too. On a whole, I think it's more of a priority thing. I think the PHP manual should be as complete and accurate as possible when it comes to being a reference manual. This is one field probably no other manual will beat us and it's sort of the de-facto reference manual. Having other stuff such as tutorials might move us from what I think is the primary goal but obviously if someone doesn't feel like writing reference material but really wants to put a tutorial in our reference manual then why not? I do urge everyone though to try and keep the main focus on it staying a complete reference manual (including language explanations) and prioritize other useful content lower. BTW, I think Rasmus' attack on Zend.com is very uncalled for. There seems to be some kind of anti-Zend in him whenever one of us two says something. I don't think Zeev meant that we don't want tutorials in the reference manual so that Zend.com will have more visitors. We're not in the advertisement clicking business. And in any case, Zend.com will continue to have quality articles no matter what appears or doesn't appear in the reference manual. And the reference manual is on Zend.com too so we wouldn't lose from it. I just think the reference manual should primarily focus on what it is best at. It is the most complete and best reference manual around. There are many tutorials and writing tutorials for the reference manual shouldn't harm the completeness of the reference manual. If it's an add-on and doesn't come on account of the reference manual then put it in. It's not such a big deal like everyone's making out of it. So let's just people contribute what they want, but IMO keep the #1 goal at keeping the reference manual up-to-date and complete. It's an open-source project. Andi --- Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/