Updated 2011-04-27 11:40:23 by LVwikignome

Purpose: To present to the reader some introductory remarks about the various Tcl FAQ documents available.

As of March 5, 1999, these are still just normal HTML documents. One day, JC, AK, and others are going to provoke me enough to move all the data into a Wikit. Right now the hold up is that I like being able to generate a readable document for posting occasionally and I am not _quite_ at the point where I feel warm and fuzzy enough about getting data out of a Wikit and into a flat file.

So currently, take a look at http://www.purl.org/net/Tcl-FAQ/ to see what I have.

LV

The "Tcl Language Usage Questions And Answers" FAQ is here [1] , but appears not to have been updated since 1997 (at least looking at what the web server reports as the modification date for the page.

Nov. 22, 2000

What would people think of having the entire Tcl-FAQ within Wikit pages? Is this something that would be of interest? The current URLs would become links to the appropriate Wikit pages...

RS 2000-11-22: Yes please! And about generating a readable document: I often surf the Wiki in my Netscape, and when there is some text I want to reuse, just copy'n'paste with the mouse... But mostly it's the other way round: copy from news reader, paste into new Wiki page ;-)

so 2000-11-24: Ditto. It would make the FAQ emmimently more useful. while we're here: Richard, thanks for all the great work on the Wiki. Larry, trying to maintain the FAQ must really be a pain in the a... Thanks.

LV Note that in the several years following the above remarks, I have put a portion of the FAQ onto the Wiki. I would have put more, but was faced with the question Is putting the FAQ on the wiki, one package per page, a benefit or a harm to the Wiki?

My opinion was that putting one package on a page was preferred, as it would make commenting on the package easier, make it easier to supply references and search, etc.

However, since the question has arose, I decided to hold off and see what the community wanted. As the community has been rather silent about the topic, I wondered a second question - would it be better to move the FAQ pages off to their own Wiki - which would use the same underlying software like Tcler's Wiki, but would allow there to be a seperation. At least with a second wiki, tcler's wiki would not be flooded with thousands of pages of information - some of which would initially be stale until the community updated it. Perhaps this new wiki could form the basis of some sort of community resource discovery site.

LV 2011-04-27 As a further update since the above remarks, I am currently less involved with things due to a variety of reasons that need not be discussed here. In any case, if someone wishes to work with the FAQs, either to put things into a database, or a wiki, or just to update the current files, that would be a welcome contribution to the community which would not require, in most cases, programming ability.

Please leave your comments and suggestions here.