On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:50:38 +0100 Stefano Zacchiroli <z...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 11:18:57AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > > Just out of interest, what's the difference between doc-central and > > dwww ? > > That's a pretty damn good question :-) > > I've made the choice between dwww and doc-central several years > ago. _IIRC_ , back then dwww was missing decent browsing of the doc-base > sections which is my main access path to documentation; more generally, > I liked dwww more back then. FWIW I've just re-looked at dwww after > your prod, and it seems that it has improved a lot over time. Agreed - and as dwww has progressed, doc-central appears to have stalled. The Documentation Menu in dwww covers all I need from doc-base and the addition of man page browsing, info document browsing, viewing any file in any /use/share/doc/ directory and automatic linking from changelog.Debian.gz to the BTS and similar - it's all really neat. Add in the dpkg-www package to link to the Packages / apt cache data and doc-central could have a lot of catching up to do. The only thing missing (for me) from dwww is an area covered by devhelp - and even then a simple symlink is enough to make things like the gtk2.0 reference manual available in dwww. devhelp has useful integration with some IDEs so that's why I use that one as well. > If the point of yours, beside curiosity, was also to phase out > doc-central in favor of dwww, that might be an option, but then > agreement should be sought between the two packages maintainer and a bit > of smooth upgrade path should be provided. Any migration would only be due to doc-central becoming orphaned and then not adopted. doc-central appears to be a native Debian package, so if it really is abandoned, it is could fall into bit-rot quite quickly. There are plenty of situations in Debian where users have a choice of options that have pros-and-cons. Personally, I don't see a need to migrate - yet - as long as doc-central is usable and does the smaller task of just the doc-base files, it is probably worth having both. If there is any particular content that advises doc-central over dwww (on www.debian.org or on the Wiki) I'm not aware of it, so it's left to user choice. Having dwww just means that should doc-central need to be removed for problems that arise in the future, we have a easy alternative. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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