Re: more improvement of alsa web pages

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Wed, 24 Apr 2002 08:29:44 -0400,
Paul Davis wrote:
> 
> >how about to add informational pages for each driver, and make links
> >from soundcard matrix?  then a user can reach to the detailed info by
> >two clicks from the top page.
> >
> >a driver page will contain:
>   
>  [ ... ]
>  
> >the pages should be controlled by cvs, so that both developers and web
> >admins can keep them up-to-date.
> >an advantage is that we can generated documents for
> >alsa-kernel/Documentation from these files.
> >
> >i'm not sure whether these docs to be auto-generated or should be
> >static files.  also, we need to discuss which format is best - sgml,
> >docbook, html or else.
> >
> >we can start from converting existing docs (e.g. CMIPCI.txt) to
> >such pages.
> >
> >
> >any comments please?
> 
> we had quite a bit of discussion about this a month or two back. some
> people were in favor of something like a wiki, where people could add
> information in a dynamic, immediate way, and thus increasing the
> likelihood that we'd accumulate a bunch of useful information. others
> wanted something more like you're suggesting.
 
ah, i remember the thread, too.


> i think that its important that there is a mechanism to make
> collecting information from users extremely easy, because otherwise
> there simply won't be very much in this pages. CVS doesn't meet this
> requirement since its intended to grant write access to a relatively
> small number of people (and certainly not just anybody who happens to
> have a useful piece of info about their audio interface).

yes, feedbacks from users are very important.  however, i am
suspicious to give any possibility for arbitrary users to write / 
update the contents.  i prefer a non-interactive system with
moderators (or editors) to keep the quality and consistency of
contents (please remember that i think of documents to be put in the
kernel tree, too).  moderators receive a page source (e.g. wiki) from
users and put it to the web.

for quick reaction to the new info, we can have an e-mail account
which notifies the mails to all moderators, so that it's updated asap
by one of them.  in the above i suggested cvs only as a method to keep
the page sources and solve the confliction between moderators for
updates.


> patrick even mocked up a sample page which i critiqued in a number of
> ways. 
> 
> whatever we do, we should move forward with this fairly quickly,
> because its one of the biggest weaknesses (after the complete lack of
> user-usable documentation for ~/.asoundrc) of ALSA at this time.

yeah, exactly..


Takashi