Conversion to SVN

[Niclas Zeising]

On 10/07/11 17:33, Glen Barber wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 10/7/11 10:13 AM, Ulrich Spörlein wrote:
>> What I, personally, would like to see is us using the same svn repo as
>> src. That means we would have to stop svn.freebsd.org for the
>> conversion, turn off email sending, dump 50k revisions into it (under
>> /doc and /www perhaps? where should branches/tags end up?), then turn
>> everything back on.
>>
>
> The following is something that I have been kicking around in my head
> for quite some time, but haven't found the right time to bring it up:
>
> What I would like to see "someday" is a development workflow that more
> closely matches src.
>
> What do I mean by that?
>
> I think it would be beneficial to provide a "versioned" FreeBSD
> Handbook.  The PostgreSQL documentation folks do this [1] - you can find
> documentation that was specific to a particular release, so you can
> determine if something you have found in the docs appropriately matches
> the version you are running. [2]
>
> A bigger reason I think this would be a good thing is actually a rather
> obvious one:  those of us (doc folks) tracking -CURRENT can document
> things as they happen.  More specifically, we would not have to wait
> until we are nearing a release to begin updating documentation that is
> relevant to that release.  This way, doc/www HEAD (well, not necessarily
> www for this case...) would be as up-to-date as possible with -CURRENT,
> which I believe will benefit all of us (especially our users) when
> release time is near.
>
> I have not yet put much more thought into the layout.  As I said, I was
> waiting for the "right time" to bring this up and ask for opinions,
> feedback, etc.  Since the topic of moving to subversion has been brought
> up, now seems to be as good a time as any, since this would probably be
> easier to juggle with subversion.
>
> [1] - http://www.postgresql.org/docs/
> [2] - For the record, yes, I am volunteering to do the work that would
> be required to make this happen, too.
>
> Just my $0.02.  :-)
>

I don't care very much about whether we use the existing svn repo or 
not, as long as we get one. Using a versioned handbook (and possibly 
other docs as well) sounds like a really good idea, and I don't think it 
will incur that much administrative overhead for either us doc people 
nor the freebsd.org admins. This will also make it possible to rip out 
some old stuff from the current handbook (such as ISDN information) and 
just point people to earlier handbooks where it is present, thus making 
the handbook more closely match what is in the release it tries to document.

Best regards!
-- 
Niclas Zeising