[rfc] website improvements

[Aaron Bentley]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Martin Pool wrote:
> Thanks for replying (and Andrew too.)
> 
>> I've been a bit frustrated because it feels like the previous redesign
>> of the wiki was never completed.

> I'll ask Matthew to fix those particular things.  I feel that
> frustration too, and

Thanks.

> I don't know if you've ever done the wiki update tasks from the
> ReleaseChecklist, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as easy or
> instant.  It is really stretching it beyond what works well.

Can't say I've had the pleasure.  I did say I think the Moin API looks
decently hackable, so anything you can automate ought to be
Moin-automatable...

>>   "not to mention WAY faster (wikis are always terribly slow for some
>> reason)"

>> So static pages aren't even twice as fast.  If Andrew's finding
>> bazaar-vcs.org slow, perhaps something is wrong with his internet
>> connection.
> 
> I think there would be more of a difference loading them from a real
> browser, which will need to get CSS, images, etc.  From here (.au,
> wireless) measuring using FasterFox, I have 1.788s for the doc page,
> and 6.636s for the Bazaar home page.  So that's both ~4x slower, and
> getting to a pretty long time in absolute terms.  It is probably more
> to do with the theme than the hosting software though.

Andrew was saying the problem was that it was wiki-hosted, so I wanted
to compare a dynamic page to a static page.  (presumably, all the theme
resources are static.)

> I think Andrew may have been talking about speed of editing rather
> than loading.  Without measuring, I think it takes me on the order of
> 10x more time to save a page to a wiki, and open a new one for
> editing, compared to doing the same between files in vim.  Even with
> EditMoin it's slower.

Fair enough.  But then running rst2html and previewing it in FireFox is
more painful to me than previewing in Moin.


>> "but the quality problems with the Bazaar website far far exceed those
>> two pages. both in terms of content and performance."
>>
>> I think fixing the content is best addressed by fixing the content, not
>> by changing the mechanism by which we update content.  Especially not by
>> making it harder to fix the content.
> 
> I'm not sure where this double-quoted text came from, maybe a long-ago
> post of AfC?

It's from IRC yesterday:
http://bzr.arbash-meinel.com/irc_log/bzr/2008/01/bzr-2008-01-09.html

> I do think both visually and textually wikis make it
> hard to have really polished content, which is what you want for a few
> core pages.

Well, it can't be the difference between Moin markup and ReST...

> What do you mean by 'look'?  I am working on having the docs
> integrated with the rest of the site (eg having a navigation bar in
> their html versions) using the docutils api.

I meant looking as polished as the wiki does, e.g. with pretty_docs.
Though if you prefer Mako over Kid, that's fine.

Aaron
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHhwaC0F+nu1YWqI0RAm9HAJ4ofJq9N2h4MRxdWNKT2aiAfL0+YQCfRzde
Xpq43gmzjG52Jk+ewMiSXCU=
=sWBz
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----