[postgis-devel] Making PostGIS documentation process easier

Paul Ramsey pramsey at opengeo.org
Thu Jun 24 15:33:36 PDT 2010


You should ask the Mapserver doco folks how their experiment with
wikification went... OK, I'll ruin the story, it was a disaster.
Versioning was unavailable, developers stopped adding documentation (I
guess developers like to commit), occasional spam fires added to
maintenance, and the everything new ended up locked up in a database,
which made things like generating PDF (you can do that with the
postgis docs) impossible.

I consider the Sphinx RST format an improvement over docbook, but as
Regina points out in her post, we've managed to leverage the added
structure in docbook to gain some surprising features, so it's a hard
call: the greater ease of editing sphinx vs the many features
available through the XML based format.

P.

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Pierre Racine
<Pierre.Racine at sbf.ulaval.ca> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I know I will ennoy some people here but it seems to me that we would gain a lot by making the PostGIS documentation wiki style. We could benifit more from the community experience and be able to update it more quickly and frequently. What are the pros of keeping the documentation process that closed in the source tree in obscure XML comparing with open wiki pages? Seems to me that since the appearance of wikis, fixed, closed documentations are very much old fashion and look like death things. Right now I think only one person is maintaining the doc. We could be more if it would be easier.
>
> I know one of the argument is that each release need its own documentation since updates apply only to certain releases but to me this is not incompatible with a wiki. We can have one versions of the doc per release still in wiki style.
>
> Pierre the wiki guru
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> postgis-devel mailing list
> postgis-devel at postgis.refractions.net
> http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-devel
>



More information about the postgis-devel mailing list