Wine Knowledge Base - wine-devel

23 Jan 2005


      Hi,
I was going to wait a while (until it had a bit more content) before
announcing this here, but as it seems people are setting up Wikis etc
already here is my 2 cents:
http://navi.cx/svn/misc/trunk/winekb/index.xml
** THIS IS NOT A WIKI **
Instead, it's a mini website that uses a simple dialect of XML suitable
for embedding code and random text into. It's designed to be:
- Easy to improve
- Visually appealing
- Controlled
What do I mean by these things?
Firstly, easy to improve: if you want to add some content to a page, save
or wget the file to disk, edit it in your favourite text editor, and then
send me the diff (or the full file and I'll diff it for you). You don't
need any web design skill, as you can see if you do a "View Source" in the
page.
Secondly, visually appealing: I dislike the way Wikis look most of the
time. XSL:T is a nice language for doing tree transformations so I used
it. The page code looks like this:
<kbpage title="Index">
<section title="Users">
    * Installing <l>NativeMSI</l> and <l>NativeDCOM</l>
    * The <l>ConfigFile</l>
* <a href="http://bylands.dur.ac.uk/~mh/wine-faq.html">#winehq channel faq</a> - read this when you have an issue
  </section>
<section title="Developers">
    * <l>AddingStuff</l> to this site
    * <l>InterestingPatches</l>
    * <l>WinelibAsBinaries</l>
  </section>
</kbpage>
See? It's easy. Yet the resulting pages looks quite nice IMHO and are
uniform in style. There's a new page template here:
http://navi.cx/svn/misc/trunk/winekb/template.xml
Thirdly, controlled: one of the objections Newman always had to a Wiki was
that it'd fill up with crap or become another appdb, and then he'd have to
maintain it. You can contribute to the knowledge base by sending patches
to me or to wine-devel (if you think others would find the text useful),
same as any other project. I won't be adding anything there that
duplicates the appdb except maybe for extremely popular programs and
libraries like MSI and DCOM.
You can hack on it in other ways: the code for the site is managed using
Subversion/SVK, so you can check out a copy of it like so:
$ svn co http://navi.cx/svn/misc/trunk/winekb
If you want to do a lot of work on it, use SVK which will let you branch
changes and commit locally so you can keep your patches separated nicely.
Right now there isn't much content. There's some stuff for users, like how
to set up a basic config file, how to install native DCOM etc, and there
is stuff for developers like a list of interesting-yet-bounced patches and
some notes on the "Winelib programs as binaries" work me and Vincent did.
It's designed for content that doesn't really fit the main WineHQ website.
If I think something makes more sense in the developer guide I'll ask you
to send the content there.
In other words, the KB is designed to be half-way between the
structured and professional WineHQ website and a Wiki.
Hope that helps!
thanks -mike