[Bioperl-l] Wiki and readme docs?

[Chris Dagdigian]

The basic answer is that writing code is 'sexier' than the boring stuff
like documentation and website maintenance. We are rate limited by our
volunteers in terms of what we can do. The great thing about perl and
POD is that we can embed our documentation into the modules themselves
which at least means they are kept reasonably up to date. Website and wiki
documentation is not as straightforward and tends to lag behind. There are
parts of our website that are so old as to be completly wrong...we just
haven't had the spare cycles necessary to go off and do a clean sweep.

Wiki was easier when it didn't require a password but then we had morons
who thought it was a fun thing to delete large sections at a time. We
spent so much time cleaning up after vandals that we had to password
protect the wiki page edit functions.

In an interesting social engineering experiment the password is made
public on our list: username=wiki password=wicked. Our guess is that the
morons who deface the website are not folks who actually read the email
list or archives :)

All of the POD docs are mirrored on the web, the main link to them can be
found at http://bioperl.org/Core/Latest/.

I've placed links to the pod2html translated stuff into the Bioperl wiki.


-Chris


On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Wiepert, Mathieu wrote:

> I was just curious about the Wiki web docs, and how they relate to the
> available pod's.  I recently decided that rather than run everything
> remotely on a Unix box, through PC-X ware, I would experiment with setting
> up my workstation with Perl and Bioperl.  For some unclear reason, my
> browsing brought me to the Wikiweb, to the BioperlGettingStarted section.
> That seemed a reasonable place to find the docs.  There was nothing there
> that I could see.  I then remembered that I had looked at the pod, and went
> and found the readme on the download page (it was at the bottom of the page,
> and so off my screen after I had downloaded).  Then all was right with the
> world.  But, I was just curious, will all this great documentation be
> mirrored to the web, or is it to remain in the pods?  Or is this one of the
> things that has to be gotten to but is not a priority yet (which is fine, as
> I say I found what I needed, so there is documentation available if you pay
> attention :)
>
> Anyway, it is not big deal, just htought I would mention it.
>
> Thanks
>  - Mat