Re: Colons in wiki page titles, and commit fest page names

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Brendan Jurd wrote:

> So, what naming scheme should we go with?  I guess I would lean
> towards "CommitFest YYYY-MM" for easy lexical sorting.

I don't know.  Maybe that is a good format.  Maybe we should be naming 
them "8.4 CommitFest 1,2,3".  This whole Year/Month format presumes a 
schedule that may or may not happen.  For example:  the next CommitFest is 
named "May 2008" right now.  But what if it isn't then?  Maybe some people 
end up on vacation and the whole thing slips a month.  If the page was 
named "CommitFest 8.4-2" instead that problem goes away (but lexical 
sorting falls apart circa 10.0-1).

I haven't thought about all this enough to have a good answer yet.  And 
that's really the point:  I don't think anybody else has either, because 
this hasn't been happening for long enough yet.  As time goes by, there 
will be more information to help guide this sort of decision.  There is 
nothing going on here that relies on this being cleaned up right now, and 
the longer that's put off the more input will be around on how to do it.

One interesting property of content is that if you generate a bunch of it, 
it's a whole lot easier to organize that than it is to predict how to 
organize in advance.  I didn't have any idea what the entry page for the 
developer's section should look like until the other day, when I sat down 
with all the available content pages and then struggled for a bit with how 
to organize them usefully.  Didn't have a clue how to fit all that 
together until there was a critical mass of pages written, then I was able 
to play with the pieces for a bit until I fit them together in a useful 
way.  That's always how this sort of thing goes.

Similarly, there are parts of the CommitFest structure that are going to 
need at least one more round before it's clear what the best way to handle 
things is.  This is why I'd prefer to do as little pre-organization as 
possible right now.  I think your time, for example, would be better spent 
on the neat template work you've been doing--which has a direct, 
functional improvement in how people do the CommitFest work--rather than 
worrying about trivia like how the names will one day need to be changed 
in order to accomidate CommitFest name clashes that can't possibly exist 
this year.  If it's not clearly impacting how people work, forget about it 
for now.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"  --Tony Hoare

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD