Wikipage Changeset proposed for deletion

[Matt Mackall]

On Mon, 2012-10-29 at 02:28 +0100, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> The question is, if we really have to rip out every single possible
> overlap between the wiki and the book.

No, I'm sorry, that is no longer a valid question because I've already
granted you a counterexample as recently as Friday. Also, it's blatantly
ridiculous hyperbole. But since I so love repeating myself, I'll respond
to it anyway:

Yes, I've said we don't want to duplicate the book or the online help in
the wiki. But please note the "or" and the "duplicate", because I have
yet to actually delete or propose deleting anything for duplicating with
the book, let alone merely overlapping.

For reference, here's one of the many examples of what "duplicating the
online help" looks like:

 http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Bundle?action=recall&rev=8

See how trivial that content is and how it actively makes the wiki a
worse place by being a grossly out-of-date stub version of this?

 http://www.selenic.com/hg/help/bundle

See how it was summarily removed without even flagging it first? See how
ChangeSet __was not removed__, despite its many flaws?

Now let's look at that ChangeSet page again and critique it in detail:

 a) one useful line of glossary, much like the online help
 b) a second useful line for a related term (adjacent in the glossary)
 c) a shallow dive into the technical details of hash calculation
 d) a grab-bag of trivial descriptions for other less-related terms and
commands
 e) an (out-of-date) example of how to poke at it with debugdata
 f) bogus camelcase page name
 g) non-conforming style

As I've already explained, this is not the content I want users to see,
particularly because of (c), (e), (f), and (g). What's of value here is
(a)... which is in the glossary. As are (b) and (d).

The reason it continues to live is that (c) and (e) probably ought to be
explicitly described somewhere... just not linked to every single usage
of the word "changeset" on the wiki.


Now perhaps implicit in your mention of the Repository page is the
notion that there's significantly more to the subject of "changeset"
than can be summed up in a short glossary entry and that it actually
warrants a significantly more thorough page than the existing one.
Perhaps; I'm not sure what you'd put on such a page, but I might not
have flagged such a hypothetical page for deletion. The point is not to
delete every page with the same title as a command or glossary term, no
one ever said it was. The point is to "remove content that duplicates
the online help".

(I'd rather not discuss this any further during the freeze as composing
the above took two hours and I'm a finite resource.)

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.