Website download section: location of Mac OS X Readme

[Geert Janssens]

My changes to the website regarding a download section are nearly done. My 
previous thread left some unanswered questions. Due to the length of the 
thread, these questions risk being lost, so I decided to create a new thread 
for each of them.

Question 2. Where to fetch the Mac OS X Readme file ?

This file is currently hosted on sourceforge and the www.gnucash.org website 
links to it there. However, due to the sourceforge website works, it will 
first show a download page (with commercials) before actually fetching the 
file. For a simple readme, this is not nice.

By the way, the file is currently called Readme, but in my opinion the 
contents could also be described as "Additional release notes for MacOS X" and 
could be treated that way while finding a proper long-term solution for them.

Different solutions I see:
* Leave it as is, just live with the redirect.
* Setup a "Release notes" section in wiki, store all release relevant 
information (release notes, changelog, readmes) there and link there. Also 
replace the SF Readme with a short message that points to the proper wiki 
page.
* Add a copy of these files in htdocs and link to them there.
* Post the readme file as a news item whenever a new MacOS X build is 
available.

The first option would be ok for a short-term solution, to get the download 
changes up and running already while a broader solution is discussed.

I came up with the second option while taking a step back and looking at the 
complete Gnucash website mix. Gnucash has serveral of them
* a semi static www.gnucash.org
* a wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/ (why is this not wiki.gnucash.org without the 
subdirectory by the way ?)
* an svn.gnucash.org/trac
* lists.gnucash.org for mailinglists and irc logs
*...

Mostly the first two interest me in this context. Is there a clear set of 
conditions that dictates when a page is supposed to go on the static 
www.gnucash.org or wiki.gnucash.org ?

My feeling is that wiki pages are more flexible than plain php/html/css, more 
easily rearranged, improved, reworked and they get a consistent style across 
pages almost for free. Several other free software initiatives I follow [1] 
use wiki like websites to host release notes. I think it simply works well for 
such information.

Another -perhaps even more long-term- direction would be to migrate large 
parts of the static website to a true cms (like drupal[2]), which shares many 
of the advantages of a wiki, but is more flexible in many ways. For example, a 
wiki isn't very well suited to host a front page for a website. I'm mainly 
checking for potential interest here. If enough people think this is a good 
idea, I may spend some time in the future to actually realise this. I'll have 
to do a number of drupal based websites soon, so I will have some experience 
in that area.

Back to the options. Option three, could be a fair intermediate solution. I 
think  we only need to host the most recent stable and unstable readme file on 
www.gnucash.org. The site only provides options to download those directly. 
All other releases have to be downloaded via SF and there the file is readily 
available.

Option four would mean that each time a new Build of Gnucash for Mac OS X 
becomes available, there would also be a news announcement for it. This is 
something that's missing now, but would be interesting. On the other hand this 
would not give us a direct link to the readme file. There is currently no code 
available on the website to display only one news item. It would be a fairly 
trivial thing to fix though, but as a whole the solution is not really clean. 
I think in the long run it would be more beneficial to migrate the website to 
a CMS.

So I propose for the medium term to add the most recent stable and unstable 
readme file on the www.gnucash.org server and John can update those whenever 
he does a new release.

Finally, I'm rather confused currently about what information is supposed to 
go where and why that would be. As I see it now there's still room for 
improvement ;-) Perhaps I should open another discussion on this where we 
could evaluate the merits and drawbacks of several different website solutions 
on a higher level.

Geert

[1] Mandriva http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.0_Notes,
Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes
[2] http://www.drupal.org, this is used for example by http://www.scribus.net