Talk:Main Page/Archive/2006-2011

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Sorry, I don't want to junk up the main page with someone's opinion on "the manual" and the wiki documentation. Hellosimon 10:41, 5 June 2006 (PDT)

I too think that the Main Page shouldn't get too verbose. I don't understand the need for that little comment in the User Documentation section, but if someone insists on having it placed on the wiki, then a compromise should be reached somehow. I suggest moving it to some other articles. --64.229.232.249 16:14, 5 June 2006 (PDT)

I agree: Simon, while you have definitely done some nice job here, you need to realize that you can achieve much more by collaborating constructively with other contributors rather than by simply opposing contributions of people who have in fact contributed significant amounts of work to the project for quite some time. I think, the corresponding paragraph wasn't an "opinion" on the manual or the wiki and it certainly wasn't meant to reflect badly upon your efforts, rather it was merely meant to complement the wiki. There's simply a very clear relationship between "The Manual" and "the wiki", if you fail to recognize this, your contribution (that is, this wiki) -even though very much needed and extremely worthwhile- is condemned to fail eventually.

On the other hand, I would recommend to also look into making "The Manual" editable via some sort of web based frontend, this would also ensure that people are able to easily contribute modifications to the manual, which is really the ultimate source for flightgear users. A possible approach might be to import the underlying LaTex sources in docbook format into some sort of docbook based wiki (i.e. http://sourceforge.net/projects/doc-book/).

Also, I feel there are some sections covered in the wiki that aren't really optimally handled by a wiki: most notably the "FAQ" section should preferably be implemented via some sort of dynamic FAQ system (i.e. http://www.phpmyfaq.de), likewise the sections titled "Bugs", "TODO", "Feature Requests", "ideas" etc. could probably all be handled far more effectively by using a real bug tracker such as bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/), phpbugtracker (http://phpbt.sourceforge.net/) or mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org).

Concerning database backups: you should preferably set up a cron job to upload a compresed SQL dump to the flightgear FTP server on a regular (daily?) basis, I am sure you'll be granted write access to a corresponding directory, this would ensure that everything will in fact be backed up regularly and possibly even mirrored.

["I think, the corresponding paragraph wasn't an "opinion" on the manual or the wiki and it certainly wasn't meant to reflect badly upon your efforts, rather it was merely meant to complement the wiki."] This assumption is correct. The manual is the center piece of the FlightGear user documentation, so does anyone have a suggestion (one that makes sense) on how to deal with my comments aside from "removing it" or "moving it into negligence/insignificance" ? Martin.

Martin's text has been placed (not by me) in the paragraphs at the top. I rather like this compromise and hope it works for everyone. I agree a bugtracker would be ideal - didn't someone start one? Also, if anyone wants to grant ftp access to a server, I'll gladly cron a script to upload the backup tarball. I have it backed up to multiple locations in the meantime. - Hellosimon 11:36, 11 June 2006 (EDT)