[Openmcl-devel] ccl manual (was Re: trace on recursive functions)

[Alexander Repenning]

Sounds like we are converging towards the wiki idea. I really like it. For the Scalable Game Design project we have started to use media wiki. It works really great and has quickly become an important community tool. Our users seem to like it. Media wiki is also used for wikipedia, meaning, its pretty powerful and immediately usable by people how have contributed to the wikipedia before. 

I think generating the wiki from a source may not be a good idea as the whole point of the wiki is to give a group of people a mechanism of input and collaborative editing. Of course, if you have some existing documentation it would make sense to generate the first version of the wiki but then the wiki becomes the data base. If we agree that there is ANY place for people to add and edit information then this would suggest that the wiki should remain the prime source of the information. An output only wiki would make no sense. The moment when you allow input then synchronization with a source document will sooner or later become an unresolvable nightmare. 

If you have concerns with output: mediawiki has all kinds of tools to batch create pdfs, then there is wiki on stick to dump an entire wiki onto a USB stick. Also, media wiki includes easy to use categorization tools to automatically create tables of content, indices etc. You can define templates including styles, e.g., a method definition template.

The big question is simply if the CCL documentation is conceptualized as either a collective effort or just something that Clozure is producing for its users. Given the open source nature of CCL itself it would seem that an open documentation approach would be the best match to support the community. If that is the case then a wiki would seem to make most sense.

Alex 



On Dec 11, 2009, at 8:31 AM, Tom Emerson wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Andrew Shalit <alms at clozure.com> wrote:
>> I think this is a great idea.
> 
> Me too. My only quibble is that I don't personally think that the wiki
> should be the master document, rather it's content should be generated
> from the source document.
> 
> This weekend I'll check the docs out of SVN and look at how tractable
> it would be to automatically convert to LaTeX (my personal poison).
> I'm sure there are tools for this kind of thing already, but it
> shouldn't be tough.
> 
>    -tree
> 
> -- 
> Tom Emerson
> tremerson at gmail.com
> http://treerex.blogspot.com/
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Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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