Documentation

[David Miller]

On 1/29/2004 1:13 PM -0600, Steven Suson wrote:

> What we WILL be putting into CVS are instructions on how to build any
> binaries needed for the product, and where on our intranet to find the
> needed software. While this policy is only just now becoming company
> wide, my software department has been following this (albeit sometimes
> in code management software other than CVS) since 1990; noone has ever
> complained.

I've also seen a large number of open source projects recently where the
download tarball doesn't even include the documentation.  The ReadMe file
in the archive points you at the website for documentation.

The web is a lot easier to get at than CVS is.  I'm pretty sure that anyone
who has a firewall permissive enough to let them get CVS will have enough
access to read the online docs. :)  The people who can't get to CVS are
probably going to download a tarball, and the tarballs will have the docs
in them.

Personally, I never use the docs in my local copy, even though they're
there.  I always go to the web site when I want to look up something in the
docs.

I also have about 20 copies of Bugzilla checked out from cvs on my system,
basically because I'm working on it a lot.  So I have a copy of the docs on
my system for each checkout.  The entire docs directory is just shy of 2
MB.  the xml docs are 328K.  So this would eliminate 1.5 MB from each
checkout if we removed the derived versions of the docs from CVS.  Times 20
for the number of checkouts I have, and that frees up a not-insignificant
chunk of disk space. :)
-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/