Website download section: location of Mac OS X Readme

[John Ralls]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 12:04 PM, Christian Stimming wrote:

> Two minor points to keep in mind when comparing a Wiki page to a plain HTML 
> file:
> 
> Am Donnerstag, 19. November 2009 schrieb John Ralls:
>> The wiki page would become the primary; converting it to html is easily
>> done by opening it in the browser and saving it (or downloading it via
>> curl).
> 
> The Mediawiki pages as shown in your browser make heavy use of CSS (and 
> methinks also javascript?). Hence, saving the HTML document only gives you the 
> text content, but the design and look-and-feel might be completely gone. Not 
> that this might be a big problem here, but it is something to watch out for.
> 
>> Wikis are ad-hoc by definition, aren't they? They're also generally pretty
>> flat. Since the quartz build instructions are called MacOSX/Quartz, and
>> there isn't AFAICS MacOSX/anything else, I would be inclined to call the
>> pages MacOSX/Stable_Readme and MacOSX/Unstable_Readme.
> 
> For the MediaWiki software which is running wiki.gnucash.org, nested page 
> names (with slashes in them) are possible but don't have any special meaning 
> at all. This is in stark contrast to what developers from a unix background 
> would expect and also what people would expect who have set up a web site with 
> sub-directories before (which means, almost everyone here). But really: For 
> the Mediawiki software, a page named "MacOSX/Stable/Readme" is no different 
> from a page named "MacOSX_Stable_Readme" or just spaces in between the words. 
> In other words, using pages names with slashes will not at all give you any 
> more structure than what the wiki already has, which is virtually nothing. In 
> particular, the "sub-pages" won't have any automatic link to the "parent 
> pages" or vice versa. Using wiki page names with slashes in it is solely a 
> minor hint for those human readers who are accustomed looking at the URL. 
> Nothing more.
> 
> The only supported form of structure in MediaWiki for automatically generated 
> menus or similar are the "Categories", 
> http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Special:Categories but we don't use those much in 
> the gnucash.org wiki. Every other form of structure is purely done by manual 
> setting of links to and from the pages, as error-prone as this is.
> 

Both valid points, thanks. I think that the appearance of "MacOSX/2.2.9/Readme" is a helpful cue to anyone who's spent much time with computers, even if it doesn't actually create a hierarchy on the file system. Both that and MacOSX/2.3.7/Readme are now in the Wiki.

A few lines of XSLT will toss all of the extraneous wikiness and substitute the styles needed to make the readme for sourceforge pretty. TextEdit can quickly reformat it as rtf for the dmg. No worries.

Regards,
John Ralls