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

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Daniel Berlin wrote:

> I chose not to use mediawiki because it is heavily biased torwards wikipedia,
> and is somewhat annoying to customize to do what you want.

Sure, it's probably overkill for the present purposes.

> 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.

And it seems to work reasonably well for that sort of thing.  I just don't 
think the original poster's

> The documentation of GCC is a heavily disccussed issue here. I
> strongly feel wiki would be a solution for it.

bears much relation to how it is useful - the problems with the main 
documentation (manuals and comments) are not something wiki will help 
address, those with projects lists might be though the right relation 
between projects listed in wiki and listed as bugs in Bugzilla needs 
experimentation.

> So people don't seem too concerned that the gccwiki is on dberlin.org

I don't see that as a problem for the present use of the wiki.  It's an 
experiment with the addition of a particular tool to those for GCC 
development, such experiments are to be encouraged, and a move is always 
possible in future anyway.

> 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.

Whereas I consider any sort of publication involves much the same careful 
due consideration that the change is exactly the change you wish to 
publish, and find editing something in CVS and submitting a patch for duly 
visible review is more convenient and involves less thought than using a 
wiki interface that I use less frequently than CVS / diff and produces 
diff output that looks uglier than the simple plain text output of diff 
-u.  Each to his own.  The wiki provides an additional tool that is useful 
for certain purposes.

(Given the complexity and obscurity of some projects list entries, peer 
review *is* useful before something is removed from a projects list in 
case someone knows of something covered by that entry that has not in fact 
been completed or obsoleted.  Adding projects, clarifying and recording 
the results of discussion of them, etc., need less review.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
  http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/#c90status - status of C90 for GCC 3.5
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)