Re: [boost] [Important] Boost moving to Subversion on Tuesday, July 31st

From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-07-27 15:56:49

On Jul 27, 2007, at 3:23 PM, Rene Rivera wrote:
>> My feeling is that developer-centric documentation should move to the
>> Trac Wiki, where it can be easily modified/updated by all of our
>> developers.
>
> Hm, I don't think editing the new website is any harder to
> modify/update. I worked hard to come up with a structure that makes it
> easy. All it takes is the svn access and a text editor. Or if editing
> XHTML directly is dreadful to you, there are many "visual" editors out
> there that will work.
>
>> It doesn't really need to be on the main web site.
>
> Depends, on what you mean by "developer-centric". Sure we have  
> multiple
> audiences but we have to consider that there isn't much difference
> between prospective and existing Boost developers. And that making an
> explicit distinction between them is likely detrimental to making
> prospective devs into active devs. But overall I prefer to have  
> docs in
> the svn/website as it allows for better quality control.

There are a lot of things in the day-to-day development of Boost that  
users just don't need to know about. The various workings of our  
Subversion repository, release management procedures, header  
policies, etc. just don't matter to users. I guess they could live  
somewhere on boost.org, away from the user-centric documentation, but  
I prefer the ease-of-use of a Wiki. My hypothesis is that, if we make  
it really, really, really easy to make improvements to that developer- 
centric documentation, we'll get better at keeping it up-to-date and  
relevant.

That said, just moving the website into the Subversion with auto- 
update (as we already have for beta.boost.org) takes much of the pain  
of our web site updating. Changing things on Sourceforge is a  
nightmare :(

        - Doug