RE: [Axiom-developer] Front page esthetic

[Page, Bill]

On Tuesday, August 01, 2006 5:52 AM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> ... 
> See
> http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandboxAxiomSources
> and tell me what you think.

Thanks Ralf. I think this draft looks great!

> (Could one have a table of contents at the top of that page?)
>

What did you have in mind? Table of Contents for the contents
of the page or something more inclusive?
 
> (4) Browse sources online
> That should be something like the "Online Source" that 
> currently exists.
> But if you press "Online sources" currently it leads to
>       
> /mathaction/axiom--test--1/
> 
> I know it is irrelevant, but the "test" in the name is 
> misleading. The page
> http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/axiom--test--1/FrontPage
> (and archive) should rather be called "Axiom-Stable". Yes, 
> not the same naming conventions as the tla archive. Bill,
> if you could write on top of that page that people are browsing
> the latest stable release, that would be wonderful.

The current "Online sources" are actually pamphlet files implemented
as wiki pages. Some details are provided here

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/210

You might also wish to review the history of pamphlet file support
on the wiki in the axiom-developer email list.

The main idea here is to provide direct support (including editing
and noweb) for pamphlet files through the wiki interface. But more
needs to be done to integrate this with the rest of the Axiom build
process.

The 'axiom--test--1' pages correspond to what the Axiom sources
were about last August, 2005. There have been some online updates -
especially those required to allow Axiom Wiki to generate hypertex
dvi and pdf files, but none of these changes have been propagated
back to the original sources (either gold or silver). I used a
different name 'axiom--test--1' as a reminder that this source
is not either of these.

The original idea was to have a way to periodically merged these
changes, but that has not been implemented yet. And of course it
is desirable to merge changes from gold (or maybe better silver)
to the "online sources". This also has to been implemented.

And most ambitiously, one could have an automatic build process
that built Axiom directly from the current online sources and if
it was successful, automatically run a series of "test" wiki pages
containing Axiom commands and expected results.

But all of this is just duplicating through-the-web, processes that
are normally accomplished using the more conventional approach.
It is a kind of experiment to see how much we can do with the wiki-
based approach. I still think it is rather sexy, but until (or if)
Axiom developers show more interest in this concept, I am rather
reluctant to spend more of my time on this experiment.

But...

There are alternatives for browsing online source code directly
from source repositories. I have for example also implemented the
darcsweb cgi script that enables browsing the darcs repository. Go to

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/MathActionRepository

and click on "browsed online", then click on "axiom--main--1".

The axiom--main--1 darcs repository corresponds to the actual version
of Axiom running on the axiom-developer.org server that runs Axiom Wiki
and Axiom Portal. It is currently in synch with the arch axiom--main--1
repository because I just recently updated the version of Axiom.

darcsweb is described here:

http://auriga.wearlab.de/~alb/darcsweb/

I think there are similar online source browsers for arch (tla), cvs
and subversion. Maybe the link to the "Online source" should be to
one of these instead of to 'axiom--test--1'.

But of course these browsers do not allow online update of the source
code.

> 
> I think the "Build Axiom" entry under download is unnecessary. There 
> should be just a link from the "AxiomSources" page to the BuildAxiom 
> page. And the BuildAxiom page should be cleaned up a bit.
> 

That sounds good to me.

Regards,
Bill Page.