On Wed May 14, 2025 at 7:45 PM BST, Dan Ritter wrote:

I don't think anyone at the Arch project or the Debian project
would say that Arch is based on Debian.

ACK

It is certainly the case that their documentation is good, and
although not universally applicable to Debian packages, can be a
decent guide.

FYI, some of us have recently re-started an effort to improve the Debian
Wiki. One of the things we need to establish (IMHO) is to determine what audience the wiki is *for*. For example, it serves a useful function for Developers, with clusters of pages for Debconfs, summers of code, etc.,
and well-maintained pages for some developer tools.

It's less clear how useful the current wiki is for users. I think many
of us are inspired by how good the Arch Wiki is for users, and the
Debian wiki falls far short of that. I guess we should try to improve it
for users, but we don't have consensus on exactly how to do that, yet. Suggestions welcome!

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👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ jmtd@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net

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Jonathan Dowland wrote:

FYI, some of us have recently re-started an effort to improve the Debian Wiki. One of the things we need to establish (IMHO) is to determine what audience the wiki is *for*. For example, it serves a useful function for Developers, with clusters of pages for Debconfs, summers of code, etc.,
and well-maintained pages for some developer tools.

It's less clear how useful the current wiki is for users. I think many of us are inspired by how good the Arch Wiki is for users, and the Debian wiki falls far short of that. I guess we should try to improve it for users, but we don't have consensus on exactly how to do that, yet.
Suggestions welcome!

I'll bite.

The most prominent issue I can see is that there is no unified
sense of chronology. That is, I can look at a page and not have
any idea whether it is correct for current Stable.

A reorganization along the lines of the Postgresql doc wiki
would be a massive effort, but also really useful. If you
haven't encountered it, the navigation at the top looks like:

Documentation → PostgreSQL 17
Supported Versions: Current (17) / 16 / 15 / 14 / 13
Development Versions: 18 / devel
Unsupported versions: 12 / 11 / 10 / 9.6 / 9.5 / 9.4 / 9.3 / 9.2 / 9.1 / 9.0 / 8.4 / 8.3 / 8.2 / 8.1

on every single page. The right thing for the Debian Wiki would
be:

Documentation → Debian 12 Bookworm
Stable Version: 12 Bookworm
Long Term Support Version: 11 Bullseye
Unsupported Versions: 10 / 9 / 8 / 7 / 6 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2

with unavailable pages greyed out (but clickable and thus
creatable for folks with accounts)

That would be a huge improvement.

-dsr-

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Jonathan Dowland [2025-05-15 09:52:23] wrote:

On Wed May 14, 2025 at 7:45 PM BST, Dan Ritter wrote:

I don't think anyone at the Arch project or the Debian project
would say that Arch is based on Debian.

ACK

It is certainly the case that their documentation is good, and
although not universally applicable to Debian packages, can be a
decent guide.

FYI, some of us have recently re-started an effort to improve the Debian Wiki. One of the things we need to establish (IMHO) is to determine what audience the wiki is *for*.

I don't have a good answer to your questions, I'm afraid, but one of the problems I see in the world of GNU/Linux is this tendency to have "per-distribution" documentation for thing which are not specific to
a distribution, as evidenced by the fact that Debian users often find
the Arch wiki useful.

I wish the Arch wiki and Debian wiki (and others, obviously) could
*share* their effort somehow.


Stefan

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On Thu May 15, 2025 at 5:45 PM BST, Stefan Monnier wrote:

one of the problems I see in the world of GNU/Linux is this tendency
to have "per-distribution" documentation for thing which are not
specific to a distribution, as evidenced by the fact that Debian users
often find the Arch wiki useful.

I agree that the Debian Wiki should strive to document Debian-specific
stuff. I recently deleted (sort-of) the page DotFiles¹, after a brief discussion on this list a month ago, because it was out-of-date with
respect to Greg's wiki² and not really distribution specific (although
there are distribution specific quirks, that Greg documents).

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DotFiles
[2] https://mywiki.wooledge.org/DotFiles

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👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ jmtd@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net

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On Thu May 15, 2025 at 2:33 PM BST, Dan Ritter wrote:

The most prominent issue I can see is that there is no unified
sense of chronology. That is, I can look at a page and not have
any idea whether it is correct for current Stable.

Thank you. That is useful feedback, and I agree that we should be clear
about what version of Debian a given page (or section) applies to. (And
we should default to documenting Debian stable, IMHO)

I suggested we establish a standard way to do this as part of someone
else's efforts to write fresh content guidelines¹. I should pick that
effort back up and finish it off.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/MaythamAlsudany/DraftContentGuidelines/Discussion

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👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ jmtd@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net

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On Fri, 16 May 2025 10:11:04 +0100
"Jonathan Dowland" <jmtd@debian.org> wrote:

On Thu May 15, 2025 at 5:45 PM BST, Stefan Monnier wrote:

one of the problems I see in the world of GNU/Linux is this
tendency to have "per-distribution" documentation for thing which
are not specific to a distribution, as evidenced by the fact that
Debian users often find the Arch wiki useful.

I agree that the Debian Wiki should strive to document
Debian-specific stuff. I recently deleted (sort-of) the page
DotFiles¹, after a brief discussion on this list a month ago, because
it was out-of-date with respect to Greg's wiki² and not really
distribution specific (although there are distribution specific
quirks, that Greg documents).

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DotFiles
[2] https://mywiki.wooledge.org/DotFiles

Basically agreed, but for example, my last use of the wiki was after
the notification about apt sources. I needed to know from scratch what
to do about it. That was entirely Debian-specific, but some tasks need
a lot of general information for a beginner, and it isn't all that
practical to send the user off to find this general information from
the Net and then come back to the Debian document for specifics. A
matter of balance and personal judgement by the writer is needed.

Obviously this thread concerns who needs what, and I have generally
used the wiki to learn how to do something that I have previously known
nothing about, so I would look for very basic information to begin
with. I'd want to start by seeing 'how Debian does it'. If it's a
subject I already know something about, perhaps from years ago, I'd
generally go straight to the Net to find the most up to date details
from a forum, often the Ubuntu one.

--
Joe

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