From: JamesBritt Date: 2002-10-01T14:44:30+09:00 Subject: RE: ruby-talk separation, part II > > If somebody has a new class or library, then they should add it to > > the RAA index. Want to see what's new? Go to the RAA. > > NO, WRONG! What, specifically, is wrong? Listing items on RAA? Using RAA as a central point of information about contributed libraries? Expecting people to actively check the RAA for changes? > This is the same broken attitude that promotes the use of > Wiki's, which, as far as I'm concerned are a black hole for information > and should be avoided at all costs. Want to propagate information? > Setup a cvs commit emailer that sends out diffs. Fire up a docbook > project and hand out cvs accounts left and right. What do you have at > the end of a wiki? A chunk of HTML and a community. There's a lot to be said for a chunk of HTML and a community. There are whatever number of ways to propagate information. Face-to-face, IRC, mailing lists/newsgroups, Wikis, "conventional" web sites, books, etc. I can't see dismissing any one them outright as indicative of a broken attitude, though they can be misused. Now, at the extremes, I can't see using either IRC or books as a primary means of dissemination announcements, but what's suitable depends on the shelf life of the information, and whether some degree of interactivity is called for. > What do you have > at the end of a docbook +cvs exercise? A publishable book that's > factual and reference-able. Ironically, this may be a better topic for a different list (ruby-doc). Wikis are not meant to be pre-books. Criticizing Wikis for not being more like books, or for not lending themselves to static publishing, is mistaken. The essential features of Wikis (non-linearity, constant updating) are features books lack. Books are static, Wikis are dynamic. Similarly, announcements are transient; there is little value in archiving announcements past a brief duration. Wikis strike me as slow-motion mailing lists, and are probably not the best place to store library announcements. > Chris Morris's wiki/cvs commit dilly is of > interest to me because it could mean that wiki's will actually > broadcast raw information and will allow folks to stop having to hit > the website for changes... never mind the second step required to get a > diff. The Ruby Garden Wiki is kind enough to provide an RSS feed of updated topics. I added it to rubyxml.com (along with a few other RSS feeds). The feed is checked three times a day via a cron job. I don't know if this is any more efficient than if rubygarden.org emailed me whenever there was a change. Now, if some people decided to check updates from rubyxml.com (or wherever the RSS feed is presented) rather than rubygarden.org directly, that would distribute the load. Push or pull? Centralized distribution, or distributed storage? What are the trade-offs? > > > Use an RSS feed. > > This will be used actually. I've got a digest version of this that'll > send announce@ a nicely formatted email that has all of the modules > that are new from the last week and a list of all of the modules that > were updated. The nice thing about this is that it gets _sent_ to me, > I don't have to go trolling around looking for information. There are any number of ways to automatically fetch data. Using a mail client to pull text from a mail server is just one of them. If people are already making entries to the RAA, why wouldn't an RSS feed from RAA be sufficient? If people *aren't* maintaining entries in RAA, should they? Because if they should, but don't, then why would they bother using an announcement list? When I updated my Blogtari software, I updated an entry on the RAA site, and made an announcement to ruby-talk. My ruby-talk message used the [ANN] convention, so that folks with a particular interest in flagging announcements can have their mail readers catch it (or filter it out, for that matter). But, really, I should be able to update my RAA entry and be done, with the new information automatically propagated to those interested. Maybe this means it appears on a special list, or gets posted to ruby-talk, or is available from an RSS feed. Or all three, and more. The sense I'm getting, though, is that one will be able to get some information about new libraries from the announce@ list, and some (possibly overlapping) information from RAA, but neither one will be authoritative. Instead of having one incomplete source (i.e. RAA), we'll have two. If we want to avoid trolling around for information, then having a single authoritative source might work better. If it feeds secondary means of distribution, fine. James