Re: Documentation issues on the new website

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-13 at 20:01, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 11:44:23AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> [...]
> > > If you can make the hackery work, I think we would be better off with a
> > > system that automagically pulls the docs from cvs. My anecdotal experience
> > > (based on past efforts to keep the doctable updated) is that a second task
> > > beyond checking a doc in will often be forgotten.
> > 
> > Great, I'll push on with this then.
> > 
> > Have you guys considered doing validation on CVS checkin? I guess it's kinda
> > hard with docs all over the CVS tree...
> 
> My experience (from a work project where I had set up some automatic
> validation of stuff on checkin) is that it is actually a handicap. From
> time to time (more often than I had expected) somebody will want to
> check in something that is not quite correct so that another person can
> work on it or try to get the bugs sorted out. This instantly triggers an
> email or whatever happens on validation failure. It doesn't necessarily
> help to send the pseudo-checkin to a branch, either, since the automatic
> CVS scripts would then need to check the branch name of the recent
> checkin and only go to work if it is on the list of "interesting"
> branches (say, HEAD and gnome-2-0 for now).
> 
> I would suspect this scenario is even more common when most of the
> interaction we have is via IRC or mailing lists and developers are
> located around the world.
> 
> It is not impossible to do this (have a script that is run on every
> single cvs checkin and have the script be very intelligent about when it
> does "real" work), but it would probably be better to just periodically
> checkout and validate "offline" (i.e. away from the main CVS machine).
> 

Good points, Malcolm. And given how relatively rare a problem this has
been (at least in my experience) it's probably not worth worrying about.
Cheers,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h) jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com

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