29 Sep
2005
29 Sep
'05
8:55 p.m.
I like the tag idea. But it appears that tags are not versioned (I just
tested in the Sandbox). If you tag an XWiki page, and then go back and look
at previous versions of that page, they are shown as tagged, even though
they weren't tagged at the time they were created.
For example, let's say that the current version of the document explaining
XWiki permissions is tagged as applying to version-0.9.900. If you view a
previous version of the permissions document that was tagged as
version-0.9.840, the version-0.9.900 tag appears as well. Not good.
Maybe we could use tags for this purpose _if_ when we revise the
documentation for a new version of XWiki, we rename existing pages instead
of revising them. Is rename functionality planned soon?
Thoughts?
Stephen
From: Ludovic Dubost <ludovic(a)xwiki.com>
Reply-To: xwiki-dev(a)objectweb.org
To: xwiki-dev(a)objectweb.org
Subject: Re: [xwiki-dev] This month is DOC month
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:50:16 +0200
We could use the tag system for this.. Using tags
version-0.9.840
we could detect tags which start with "version-" and indeed show a
"Verified on XWiki version: " text at the end of the page..
Ludovic
[snip]
>Since XWiki is constantly evolving, one of the
challenges of documenting
>it
>is the "moving target" phenomenon. Say you document the XWiki permissions
>UI. Then a new version is released, and the permissions UI changes. For a
>time (perhaps a very long time), the documentation is out of sync with the
>current released version. This will cause end-user confusion and
>frustration, and it's an example of how out-of-date documentation can be
>worse than no documentation at all. Other examples include users running
>old
>versions of XWiki, looking at a documentation page that describes how a
>particular feature works in the current released version, and experiencing
>confusion.
>
>To help address these challenges, I suggest affixing a message at the top
>of
>each documentation page, like this:
>
>For XWiki version: 0.9.840+
>
>As new versions of XWiki are released, the documentation team can review
>each documentation page and determine whether the material is out of date.
>If the new version differs substantially in its behavior, the message
>could
>be changed to:
>
>For XWiki version: 0.9.840 - 0.9.970
>
>where 0.9.970 is the last version that the page accurately documents. This
>will help readers to know whether the page accurately documents the
>version
>of XWiki they're using.
>
>Eventually, the page will be revised to reflect the new functionality, but
>users running old versions of the XWiki software still need a way to view
>the documentation for their version. To deal with this, the documentation
>could provide a link to to the older version of the page. Something like
>this:
>
>For XWiki version: 0.9.975
>See also: <link>XWiki 0.9.840 - 0.9.970</link>
>
>Thoughts?
>
>Stephen