[SGVLUG] Test site update / mambo bug?

[Dustin]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> Personally, I'm kinda settling on Mambo as a "pretty good" alternative
> to hand-editing the sgvlug website.  The "nice features" are that we can
> write up items (usually meeting announcements) and schedule them to
> automatically appear / dissappear as appropriate (not much point in
> advertising last month's meeting)

I haven't played with them as much as I wanted to, but I do have an 
experiment we could try, and that is to see about how well we can do 
"wiki-like" thinks with the CMS packages.

Here's what I had in mind--we just had a comment that building packages
from source would be a good meeting, FAQ, or whatever topic.  Now, I
thought about this for a while, and realized that the problem with quick
guides is that they rarely work straight out of the box, without more
knowledge.  I chose a simple package that I thought would have a
relatively uncomplicated build (and that I already have installed as a
binary on my machine) and started the build.  Turns out I'm missing some
header files it needs.  Debian fine-grains it's packages so much that you
usually have to install the dev versions separately from the shared
libraries, and there can be a lot of these needed.  I know where to go to
find out what package I need, but it's not easy to think to mention stuff
like that.

Other systems will probably not have the same fine-grained package 
structure and thus may well have more headers installed by default, but 
they will have their own issues.  So how do you actually help anyone?

Here was my idea: suppose we had a "Wiki-like" page to develop the 
instructions together.  I might start it off with what I did to build on 
my machine and whatever other comments I want to make.  Then others of you
can do the same thing and note on the same page what you did differently 
than I did.  In this way, we build up a set of directions and notes that 
no one of us could have written.

The nice thing about this is it plays to the strengths of Twiki, whereas 
with everything else we've done we've played to the strengths of the 
CMSes.  It would be nice to know how well Mambo, say, does this.

So, does this seem like an interesting test?  It requires that someone 
besides Tom, me, Claude, Stan, or whoever work on it.  We would need some 
collaboration with others who can build packages as well as those who have 
never tried it.

I have a package in mind to kick it off, if there is enough interest to 
try a collaborative guide.

Dustin