Re: maintaining FSF Emacs web page

[Stephen Leake]

Karl Fogel <address@hidden> writes:

>>Volunteers are welcome to take similar care of the Emacs Web page.
>>I'm sure they will be most welcome if and when they come.
>
> Hmm, what is the path for such volunteers?
>
> That site & page are maintained by the FSF -- they're not in the Emacs
> tree anywhere.  In other words, whatever the procedures are for
> improving the Emacs home page (and creating a developer welcome page),
> they are completely different from the procedures for improving the
> Emacs code.  So, yay, now I have to learn *two* contribution paths.

One solution to this is to keep the FSF page very short, and have it
refer to a web page or other docs that we do maintain.

Currently, that would be http://www.emacswiki.org/

But that's not under any CM system, and there are at least some
developers here that don't want to use it.

I also work on monotone; their web page (http://www.monotone.ca/) is
a wiki that is automatically synced with a monotone repository, which
can also be edited by "normal" means. I find that very convenient.

Another choice is to simply keep the important docs as formatted text
files in the Emacs git repository, and leave the wiki as supplemental
but not required.

>>Of course we do: etc/CONTRIBUTE.  We just decided to move it to the
>>top-level directory.
>
> It should be a web page.  That's how things work now.

That may be what lots of people are used to, but we get to decide on how
we do things.

If we hear from potential new contributors that they are turned off by
having to read docs in Emacs instead of in a browser, there are several
possible responses:

- Emacs is a browser :)

- Emacs is all about editing files; get used to it

- Ok, maybe we should do more on the web.

> But my hypothesis is that anyone who tried to convert it to web page
> right now would face multiple obstacles, including not just technical
> obstacles but resistance to goal itself.

Yes.

I, for one, _much_ prefer editing text (markup or plain) to editing via
web browsers. I also prefer reading local files; Emacs is _very_ good at
searching and navigating among them (_much_ better than Firefox or
Chrome in a wiki).

I hope you are open to considering such arguments.

> If we could work out the technical details to have a "www/" directory at
> the top level of the Emacs source tree, and have that be where both the
> home page http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ *and* soon-to-be-written
> new developer-oriented pages are maintained, would you be in favor of
> that?

That implies that there is also a mechanism that mirrors that directory
to a web host somewhere (as monotone does). 

> (I don't mean volunteer to help, I just mean support the goal or anyway
> not oppose it.)

I would be ok with that, but _only_ if sufficient people step up to
support it, with reasonable hope that they wont disappear after an
initial effort.


-- 
-- Stephe