Wiki style FAQ proposal

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 12:57:37AM +0300, Manolis Kiagias wrote:
> In my opinion, the sgml FAQ should be limited to questions about the 
> project and maybe not so quickly changing technical stuff.

This was my idea also the last time I looked at it (sigh) which appears
to have been several years ago :-(

Here is the prototype that I drew up by hacking out what I felt were
the "changeable" (and/or stale!) technical things:

  http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/

which you can compare to the latest snapshot:

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/

For the side-by-side, look at:

  http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html

vs.

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html

The former is 48 screenfuls on this laptop; the latter is 212.

Also note that 6 screenfuls are bibilography.  That should be separate
no matter what else is done.  (It could probably just stay in SGML.)

Even out of those 42, there is _still_ probably stuff that could move
to the Handbook; it was meant as a working copy, before I task-switched
to portmgr things and never task-switched back..

Finally, as to the argument about not having the technical bits on
disk, I agree with that to some degree, but if the technical bits are
years obsolete it hardly matters*.  To the extent that the bits should
ship with each copy of FreeBSD, I think you can make the argument that
a) if they are "what is the xyz subsystem", it ought to be moved to the
Handbook; if it's b) "how to get xyz to work", it ought to be moved to
a separate article.

This would leave the wiki (or CMS, or whatever) for questions that come
and go with various releases.

mcl

* example: "For FreeBSD 5.X and later you will need a 486 or better PC,
  with 24 MB or more of RAM and at least 150 MB of hard disk space."