Re: Re: hosting packages on external VCS sites

See inline.. On 3/23/07, Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson <dufuz@php.net> wrote:

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 15:09:58 -0500, Gregory Beaver wrote: Hi all, I am dismayed to see that a few of our packages that have external hosting of revision control now come up as 404, and some with external documentation come up as 404. What do you think? Greg Well I totally agree, maybe not the domain name because as someone pointed out, they can lapse. Actually this issue has been discussed before, the RCS issue that is, both here on the list (~ 1 year ago) and I posted some thoughts of my own about this on my blog but it's currently down, I'm waiting for Pierre to come back to live so he can install the system I sent him then I'll post the link to the blog post, it's a somewhat excerpt of the discussion that we had here. The bottom line is, either use cvs.php.net or a public service or be an established project like Horde, pat, etc that actually could pull off hosting their code them self. About the doc issue, I'm all about keeping it all on pearweb, docbook would be best but then someone would have to step up and make peardoc not use some utterly odd format of docbook and be more in pair with the php manual, the most important reason for this is to being able to use the nifty revision tool they have over at the phpdoc team, something you can't really get on wikis when we are dealing with multi language docs unless we maintain revision numbers by hand and make our own little scripts to travers the db to show who is out of date with the English version, how far behind, what's missing and such.

The choice of using docbook might be hard to some people to understand as this is a relatively new (~~ new is a big word) structure/language for many people. However, this is a documentation standard and we can state also projects using it as such as the Zend Framework. Also, concerning using svn or cvs, this is also something we have discussed for the past what.. year or so ? we even had a page and I encourage you all to put your thoughts/facts there: http://oss.backendmedia.com/PHPSVN/ Moreover, in order to have a good wiki, a project needs a wikimaster. But this is currently being discussed and as soon as the pear group is elected we will come to a conclusion on the documentation tools, etc. This is personally my top priority if I am elected :P We are currently discussing about: ----------------------------------------------- Bug reporters; Wikis; Forums; etc. There is a lot of things that are going to be improved in pear within the next few months and I hope to see you all participate in all that :). The goal we are trying to achieve is to first, make the task of writing docs, not a problem but something that can be done without pain and too many problems. We have to get the idea that writing docs is painful (even though it is in any language possible most of the times) because it is extremely useful. more ? yes.. I can't agree with you Markus when you say that writing docbook for one package is overhead, I mean look at this page: http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/peardoc/en/package/text/ Look at text-captcha-numeral.xml and the folder. This has three pages and it is not extremely complicated to use and code. What I really like about docbook is not it's simplicity but actually is complecity, I mean book companies use this for some developers (like latex), frameworks use it, other random non-computer projects use it. This is a worldwide documentation language and this is the reason why it was built. It might take one or more hours to understand it, but learning it to a certain degree that you can write at least simple docs is rather easy.

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