[mythtv-users] Wiki Week - an appeal

[Stephen Boddy]

On Thursday 03 August 2006 16:19, Justin Hornsby wrote:
> On 03/08/06, Stephen Boddy <stephen.boddy at btinternet.com> wrote:
> <snip!>
>
> In all fairness, I think the assumption should always be (and is now)
> that users are running the latest stable version.

I recall that it was not that long ago that I read a message from someone on a 
seriously old version (0.15 or 0.16 or something.)

I don't want to speak for others, but my attitude is; if it works and meets 
your needs, don't futz around with it. A production system is not something 
that you upgrade for the sheer hell of it. It's a balancing act. When do the 
newly released features outweigh the downtime and additional work required to 
upgrade.

For me 0.19 was not so dramatic an improvement that I felt the need. 0.20 
however has a number of features that will certainly be welcome. (Off the top 
of my head: Mostly complete internal DVD player, MythArchive, MythMusic 
improvements and so on.)

> It could help if people know of discrepancies between versions to
> highlight them, but otherwise provide a big bold notice that the wiki
> info may not necessarily apply to other versions of MythTV.

This is not that different from my second suggestion. I was writing on the 
hoof, so perhaps it looked like seperate entire blocks for each version. That 
wasn't quite my intent. More like a general page, but when there are 
different procedures/commands, they are really obvious as to which version 
they apply to.

> Since the majority of users will be running the latest, greatest
> stable release I think it's only fair.  It's one thing to ask people
> to contribute but quite another (much bigger job) to expect folks to
> maintain multiple versions IMHO.

Again, I have to point out that this is not always the case. Particularly in 
the first several months of a stable release a lot of people hang back. And 
then you have the people like me who are happy to skip a version for the sake 
of a stable box in the front room. Ideally it wouldn't require maintaining 
old versions, as once the text is written and accurate, there would be no 
need to change it. A page that is specific to 0.19 where a portion is 
superceed by 0.20 would just need the person updating with 0.20 info to block 
out the older 0.19 specific stuff and add a new block for the 0.20 specific 
stuff.

This sort of echos concerns of academics that information can disappear to 
easily from the web, and that we risk losing significant and valuable 
information due to the transient nature of information on the web.

> You mentioned intiuion & reading between the lines - a fair amount of
> information about Myth has to be gleaned that way already, and it's
> that which I'm trying to reduce by encouraging users help out ;)

Yes, and it's a commendable and admirable goal. I'd like to help, but of 
course I'm on 0.18 which by your opinion means I'm obsolete ;-) and also I've 
always found wiki editing a bit confusing. I've never spent the time to get 
good at it, and on the rare occasions I do add something, it never looks like 
I intended. :-(
-- 
Steve Boddy