On Aug 18, 2009, at 1:01 AM, [Ricardo Rodriguez] Your EPEC Network ICT Team wrote:
Hi,
Vincent Massol wrote:
This is about cleaning up.
I am almost sure now: I've just jumped into the wrong thread :-( Sorry if I am adding nothing but noise.
No system can go on indefinitely by keeping everything online. The strategy is simple: - you backup (as we do every day) and remove things that shouldn't be kept. They're still available on backup should they be needed one day.
I do agree. But I've a huge problem there: how to decide which "things" should not be kept. Yes, they will be on backups, but how to be sure that "the system" will be able to find them when needed?
This is the usual question and the answer is usually that you need to keep a reader able to read them along with the data. Even more you need to maintain the reader over time to ensure it continues running on the hardware. Then how long the data is kept online completely depends on the domain and use case. In your case you could keep it 10 years online or more. Provided you have enough disk space and your DB is correctly indexed, that should work fine. For a documentation site it's a bit more problematic since the site needs to be relatively clean and when users go to it they should not feel it's a mess or a work in progress too much since otherwise this feeling will reflect on their feeling for the software. In the case at hand it's acceptable since it's on the dev wiki and not the main documentation wikis.
As for revisions we'll need a way in the future to be able to maintain that too since they grow quite large.
As devs say when you agree, +1 :-)
I don't agree about absolutely keeping old things online when they're not needed anymore. If we had done this we would still live with some mess of xwiki.org as it was back in 2005-2006.
Again, the same problem. How to decide that a "thing" is not needed? I'm afraid I must make an effort to present an example. A case study. I am thinking/working in a research environment. It is really hard to decide what could be deprecated at a given moment.
The main point of a wiki is to *NOT* keep stale things by applying constant refactorings (which is what I suggest) so I definitely don't agree about using a wiki as an archival system (there are way better solutions for that) :)
I agree! I don't think about a wiki (XWiki) as archival system. I think that I think (sic) about XWiki like a key piece in an information system helping to move textual information (prose explanation about data and thoughts) into structured documents, then into knowledge.
Perhaps documents can/must not last forever, but years should be considered as a regular duration for a document life cycle. During this time, it is possible that the size of modification won't be an issue: a single document won't growth forever, but the number of relations will do.
I've to read a much more about this!
Well I think we both agree: 1) wikis are tools that make it easy to keep stuff up to date and apply refactorings to content 2) in general it's bad form to loose content For 2) I was focusing on the content representing the solution in the design docs which I was proposing to drop from the design doc since I was proposing to move it elsewhere (in the main doc location). However I was indeed also suggesting to loose content (which was the comments in the design docs or some intermediary steps that allowed us to reach the final solution). However Sergiu didn't agree and I could understand why. So I backtracked and I've moved done design docs in a DesignArchive space. At some points it'll get removed but it'll probably be in a few years now. Thanks -Vincent
Thank you very much for your thoughts!
Ricardo
-- Ricardo RodrÃguez Your EPEC Network ICT Team