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@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD