Re: CVS docs referencing externals

On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Magnus Hagander wrote:

> http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/cvs.html refers with a link
> to the developer wiki

This weekend I was already planning to move the developer's wiki PG/MySQL
document to techdocs. Depending on how smoothly that goes, I planned to
see if it was straightforward to move the more complicated CVS page to
there as well. Would that give the content a sufficiently stable URL to
refer to?

> http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/rsync.html refers to the
> buildfarm instructions.

One loose end in the CVS documentation on the developer's wiki is to make
sure it has completely assimilated everything from the buildfarm document
on this topic, so that dependency can drop altogether once I finish that.

> Wouldn't it be better to include a version of the text directly in our
> docs, so people can actually read it if these URLs/contents change?

Hostnames change, suggested practices improve. When you're talking about
accessing a CVS repository, there's little value in knowing how things
used to be if they aren't like that anymore. If the URL is stable enough,
I'd ask why worry about keeping around old versions?

This particular content is just fluid enough still that I'd hesitate to do
the more complicated conversion into the standard documentation format,
which then requires a) periodically duplicating edits/recoverting to keep
the two versions in sync or b) only keeping the docbook version and
needing a CVS commit to make any changes.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD