Re: 1.1.2 bug, news lists

[craig at jcb-sc dot com]

>On 5 Mar 1999 craig@jcb-sc.com wrote:
>> Jeff and others, before we get too closed-down on the 1.1.2 front,
>> could y'all make sure we'll ship it with good pointers to live
>> information on the web pages regarding bugs and news?
>
>Catching up this entire thread after the weekend and just having committed
>some additional wwwdocs fixes in preparation for the release...

Yup, I want to catch up on what you've been doing, and try to
understand the resulting structure better, before suggesting (or
doing) much more.

>> I mean, I think there have been a lot of improvements made in just
>> the past week or two.
>
>Is there anything you'd still like to see in 1.1.2 resp. in general?

Aside from worrying about bug-fixes to g77?  :)

No, I think the most recent changes have the sorts of references to
the new "living docs" Jeff has added to the web site that should
suffice for some time.

>> What I'm especially interested in seeing is the top-level egcs page
>> contain two items:
>> 
>>   We try to provide late-breaking information on *known bugs*, and
>>   *news* about items already planned for upcoming releases.
>
>I have just committed a patch adding a link to bugs.html to the main
>page.

Okay, I haven't reviewed these things yet.

>With regard to a "forthcoming.html", well, that depends on someone
>providing such information.

No, what I meant was, e.g., the "g77_news.html" link (aka the "News"
node of the g77 docs) that pulls up the news info from the *trunk*
of the repository.

As long as this is kept reasonably up-to-date vis-a-vis ongoing work
on g77 (in the trunk), it amounts to "forthcoming news".

What I noticed, when Jeff first put up his cgi-bin scripts, was that
my tendency to try and keep news.texi (and bugs.texi) up-to-date,
recently pretty good, made the web pages look like they were documenting
an actual release.

So I'm planning on making some changes to clarify, to readers of
trunk-based docs, that they're reading works-in-progress docs, to a
degree moreso than the docs provided with actual releases.

And, I'm also trying to ensure that whatever we do for g77's sake
(to accommodate my tendency to document things in a rather pro-
active manner, except when I forget or get lazy ;-) can be easily
copied by maintainers of other front ends, libraries, whatever.
I'm not really sure how easy it is, though, so I'm just trying to
avoid assuming it's okay to special-case g77 in some new way(s).

>We also ship plain-text versions (via `lynx -dump`) of those HTML files in
>the distribution.

Hmm.

>As to why HTML, this is the format most people can cope with easily (by
>means of lynx, Netscape or even vi), while very few would want to read
>plain *.texi files or use GNU info, at least according to my personal 
>experience.

Hmm again.  I wonder if things would be simpler if we took all these
derived files out of the *repository*, and had them put into
distributions automatically by the distribution-making mechanism.
(There are upsides and downsides to this that I can already see.)

Oh well, it's not a pressing issue, for me right now, anyway.

        tq vm, (burley)