Re: Why don't we set up an official wiki for GCC documentation?

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 10:03 AM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Chunhua Liao wrote:
>
> > Personally, I prefer MediaWiki to any other wiki engines. There is a
> > dedicated discussion page for each article and very nice
> > auto-generated table of contents. Just spend a minute to visit
> > www.wikipedia.org. I bet you will love it.
>
> Although I agree with that preference as far as wikis go - Wikipedia 
> being
> substantially better than the other wiki designs I have seen -

There is a wikipedia skin for the wiki i'm using, i just don't have it 
turned on.
I chose not to use mediawiki because it is heavily biased torwards 
wikipedia, and is somewhat annoying to customize to do what you want.

Anyway, the goal of the wiki i set up is *not* to be a user wiki.
It is for gcc developers, and those learning to develop in gcc, so that 
they can understand the internals, the status of things, etc, in a 
collaborative environment.
In other words, it's for us.  I don't believe we need the same level of 
review for this type of documentation, and i don't think bookmarking 
emails is an ideal solution for anyone (Hands up, who bookmarked the 
link to mark's 3.5 status message in the archives?)

I also disagree with the notion that people won't contribute because 
they are concerned about long term viablility of "dberlin.org" or 
something.
dberlin.org will be around as long as i am.
As a humorous note, we still get people occasionally using 
www.dberlin.org/bugzilla to report gcc bugs.
So people don't seem too concerned that the gccwiki is on dberlin.org

Especially since most developers know me.
I also think a link to the wiki from the "contributing to gcc" page as 
a place to learn about some gcc development internals, projects, etc 
would be a good thing.
There are also things that could be easier kept up to date if they were 
in wiki, and one could just easily, and naturally, edit them.
The list of branches and projects come to mind.  Submitting HTML 
patches for those is kind of annoying and something i have to 
specifically thing about doing, and validating.
Editing a wiki page is not.


--Dan