Do we have a good way to write documents that address the fact that the
document contents may be anywhere from identical to very different to
completely N/A depending on the version of SUSE you are talking about?
It seems to me the best answer might require some fancy programming in
the wiki to do something like this:
Have the wiki "know" what the current version(s) of suse are at any
given moment, current meaning I guess, one for opensuse and one for SLE.
Have the wiki be able to tag documents as to the version(s) they pertain to.
Have a sidebar widget or dashboard item or other consistent interface
item that allows the user to select what context they're interested in,
and it defaults to current.
When a new article is created, it is created in whatever context the
user had selected, defaulting to current again.
When the current version changes, articles do not automatically get
updated to apply to the new current context by default. Links to old
articles will still work, but they will be clearly identified as being
old. The wiki interface will make it apparent that the current selected
context is 11.4 but this article doesn't exist for 11.4, so you are
seeing the most recent version that does exist which is, say 11.2.
Or, if the user has currently selected 11.2 context specifically, then
no special warnings in the surrounding wiki interface.
Code could automate away most of the drudge work of updating an article
to the next context by having a button to copy it and the user could
make whatever changes the normal way if any, and an admin can ok it the
normal way.
The point would be, rather than have the bulk of articles go stale and
be wrong by default, Instead by default they stay always correct for the
context they are in. Users still find them the same as always even if
they are old. The same exact url's will work the same way, just what
happens in the wiki is it tries the current context, then falls back to
older ones if not there. And the user knows in an intuitive at-a-glance
way that they are looking at old stuff that may only be roughly correct.
Conversely, if they have a 10.3 box they need to work on, they
specifically do _not_ want the most current info but the info that
applied as of 10.3.
And for the author I think it simplifies the problem of trying to either
write for all the different targets, or write for just one target. I
don't want to write a document that will essentially be wrong by default
next month, nor can I reasonably keep updating everything I write
forever. And even if I did that I don't want to either lose the old info
nor have a document that grows forever as it tries to account for new
contexts.
Sounds pretty fancy I know, but all the ususal ways of dealing with this
I've seen so far are so messy. Articles that either make no attempt to
address the existence of other versions besides whatever was true at the
time of writing, or articles that are always updated to current, or
articles that have a mess of essentially verbal case/esac statements all
through them making a large confusing document for even the most simple
of topics.
I guess an individual document author could almost do this themselves in
a manual way right now by just incorporating the applicable version in
the page name, and having an unversioned main page that just has links
to the versioned pages. But that requires some significant forethought
and discipline organization on the part of the author that the wiki
could really be providing automatically and by default.
--
bkw
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