Re: [Gnu-arch-users] documentation and licensing

[Alfred M\. Szmidt]

   2) No, do not use TeXinfo or Docbook -- go for ASCII-art,
      Wiki-style

Argh!? No, please, use texinfo (and the spelling is texinfo, not
TeXinfo, it has no relation to TeX!).  I have yet to see a ASCII-art,
Wiki-style markup that is as powerful as texinfo for formatting
documentation, and yet to see one of those things that generate good
printable manuals, or even info pages.  MUSE comes close, but it jumps
around the problem with using XML tags when Wiki-style magic stops
working, which is far worse than what texinfo uses with its
@-commands.

   3) Somebody make a plan.
      It should be easy to divide the project of making a new manual
      into lots of *mostly* small pieces.   For example, reference 
      documentation has one entry per command -- if several people each
      pick off just a few commands the whole job can be done quickly.

Do you mean entry as in `chapter', or as in the more sane:

 -- Function: consp object
     This function returns `t' if OBJECT is a cons cell, `nil'
     otherwise.  `nil' is not a cons cell, although it _is_ a list.

Kinda thing?

      Consider Lulu press.

One might be able to get to use GNUpress too.

   Absent 2.0 I think it likely that Arch will die.  Some ideas will
   live on in other projects and other ideas will be reinvented in
   other projects.  It's hard for me to guess how quickly or slowly
   that takes place so it's hard for me to form an opinion about how
   worth it it is to work on 1.x docs.

I doubt arch will die.  People seem to think that revision control
systems have the lifespan of a version of GNOME or something.  A VCS's
lifespan, when it works, and works well, is around the 30 year mark.
Just look at RCS, it is still in use, so is SCCS and other horrid
beasts.

The thing is that people simply do not want to change their version
control systems, unless there is a way to exactly replicate the
history between switches.  Compare this to switching between versions
of Emacs, or your window manager.