Re: migrating the NetBSD users guide to the wiki

On 03/05/2019 23:06, Leonardo Taccari wrote:
> I find `The NetBSD Guide', `The pkgsrc guide' and `NetBSD Internals'
> as books.  As them IMHO is very important to have a printer friendly
> version of them (when I first started using NetBSD and pkgsrc one
> of the first thing that I have done was printing both guides).
> 
> These days, especially for reference, I mostly consult their .txt
> version by just opening netbsd.txt or pkgsrc.txt via the $PAGER.

How do you read the wiki?

> If guides are migrated to wikisrc is it possible to:
> 
>  - have a PDF version of them?
>  - have a text version of them?
>  - have a single HTML page version of them?

The wiki is not multiformat.

> Regarding the lower barrier, I think that as they are now - especially
> for possible contributors without commit access - probably editing .xml
> has several advantages as well:
> 
>  - repositories are available via anoncvs.n.o (that's not the case of
>    wikisrc AFAIK).

These are nothing to do with the format which is inflicted on the editor
and though I haven't consulted admins, there is no reason why the
wikisrc repo couldn't be made available. I have asked Joerg if it could
be part of the conversion process - that would also make it available on
$otherscm mirror sites.

>  - when editing the .xml-s it is possible to directly check the results
>    by just regenerating the .html or other formats via make.

It is possible to preview the results with the wiki too though I don't
recall the details.

>  - IME when editing wikisrc markdown and using non trivial formatting it
>    often violate the POLA.  When making XML formatting mistakes most of
>    the times useful error messages are provided.

I think inflicting hand editing XML on people is a cruel exercise. I
would like to add content to the guide but I do not want to edit docbook
XML.


Sevan