Re: [oswg] Linux Knowledge Base project (fwd)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Forwarded message:
From owner-techwriters@linuxchix.org  Tue Aug 24 14:44:23 1999
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:01:15 +0100
From: Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>
To: techwriters@linuxchix.org
Subject: Re: [oswg] Linux Knowledge Base project
Reply-To: techwriters@linuxchix.org

Andrew, 

A couple of comments about technical issues that you (and anyone else
considering implementing something like this) might want to consider.

On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 12:32:22AM +0100, Andrew Wood wrote:
> Since I don't have a very good connection to the Internet I was thinking of
> implementing this as an email discussion group with archives available on
> the web, as well as perhaps having "submit a question" buttons on the web
> page for others' convenience; sorting through email is easier for me than
> browsing web pages.  Not sure how workable this would be in practice though.
> 
> As usual: Thoughts?

>From my experiences on the FreeBSD project, you need to be aware of a couple
of problems, and at least have some idea of how to solve them before you
begin:

 1.  Revision control.  How are you going to track changes to the questions
     (and the answers) so that you can properly attribute changes to 
     individuals.

 2.  Mirroring.  Resources like this are much more useful if they can be
     mirrored.  Both in the large sense of having multiple servers around
     the globe, so that people can be directed to the closest server to them
     as necessary, and in the smaller sense of people maintaining local 
     mirrors of the information on their computers.  For many people it's
     cheaper to maintain a local copy of the information than it is to fire
     up a connection to the Internet every time they want to check something.

 3.  Multiple language support.  If there's one thing working on the FreeBSD
     Documentation Project has taught me is that there are huge numbers of
     people in non-English speaking countries who are willing to put in 
     immense amount of effort to translate documentation from English to 
     their native language.  The FreeBSD Documentation Project has sibling
     projects converting the documentation to Japanese, Spanish, Russian, 
     Chinese, and French, to name just a few. 

A lot of people, when faced with the sort of problem you're describing think
that it's relatively easy, and just a case of a few web pages, and some
PHP, Perl, or Python linking to a backend MySQL or Postgres database.  I 
hope the three points above show why this isn't quite that easy, and that
spending some time designing this now will save a lot of pain later.

N
-- 
 [intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
 non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
 the links.
    -- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@cs.colorado.edu>