[announcement] apt links on the wiki

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 2:57 AM,  <yann_ubuntu-1 at yahoo.fr> wrote:
>
> Dear Wiki contributors,
>
> In the current WritingGuide, you (Matthew, Endolith) used a syntax giving the APT link without the "how to install a package" link.
> I don't think it is a good idea :
> 1) APT links don't work at all for Dapper users. So they need the link to other methods.
> 2) APT is not enabled by default for all browsers. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7017256&postcount=10) So they need the link where they will find the method to enable the APT links on all web browsers.
> 3) APT won't work if the appropriate repository is not enabled. The link "installing a package" will help beginners.
>
> I will change the WritingGuide and the "how to install a package" accordingly to the syntax used in the ubuntu-fr Doc since Gutsy.
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiGuide/WritingGuide
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingSoftware

This was actually intentional - I followed the same scheme that we use
in the system documentation for consistency. When we discussed this,
we thought that the use cases 1-3 you've described above were
sufficiently rare that we wanted to keep it clean. We decided that it
was easy enough to find the information about installing packages
independently without overcrowding the instructions in this way. I
actually think that including two or three links close together is
quite confusing - it isn't obvious at all where to click. I'm also not
convinced that we need to mention which repository the package is in.
Again, we don't do so for the system docs.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2008-September/011559.html

We can discuss it again, but whatever the decision is, I'd actually
like to keep a consistent style between the wiki docs and the system
docs on this point, so pending further discussion, I've reverted your
change to the WikiGuide for the time being.

What do others think about the best way to phrase these type of instructions?

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF