On Tue, 20 May 2025 10:56:05 +0100 "Jonathan Dowland" <j...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon May 19, 2025 at 2:03 PM BST, Greg wrote: > > On 2025-05-16, Jonathan Dowland <j...@debian.org> wrote: > >> 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. > > > > That's what I said more succinctly. Keep the wikis up to date (I > > thought it went without saying "for Debian stable," though there's > > always a myriad of ways to be misunderstood but normally only one > > way to be so). > > FWIW I didn't find "keep it up to date" useful feedback. One way of > interpreting it is "delete out-of-date pages". In extremis I think > this would be a bad idea (but others may not agree). > > Another interpretation is "edit out-of-date pages so they are no > longer out-of-date". We don't have enough person-power to do that at > the moment, and I doubt we ever will. So IMHO we need a more refined > strategy. > > Establishing conventions about which Debian version is described by > default (I'm sure there are those with a view that we should document > the latest package versions, rather than the latest Debian release), > and how we indicate if a section or page is applicable to a different > version, and how an editor could mark a page as potentially > out-of-date or misleading (short of removing it entirely), I think > are useful ways forward. > This is the general Internet problem. Very few technical pages on the Net include the date written, or at least, last audited. The first stage of improvement would be to quote that date, and in the Debian context, the release name(s) applicable. Not 'stable' or 'testing' of course, as they are moving targets, and the actual package version shouldn't be changing (mostly) after release. Almost always, we will be looking for information on the current stable, but sometimes we need other release (or next stable or even sid) information. While we cannot reasonably expect everything to be always up to date, what we need most is to know roughly how out of date it's likely to be, so it can be compared with other Net sources. If I'm doing something new which doesn't involve anything really Debian-specific, such as apt, that I'll generally look at the Debian documentation first but also try to find at least three relevant tutorials on the Net, as well as whatever documentation the developer provides, though that varies considerably. They will disagree, though hopefully not wildly, and again I would hope they broadly agree with the Debian documents. If not, further investigation is needed. But everything is made more difficult when *nothing* is dated. -- Joe
