+1
However, I imagine that it was a maintenance burden.
Indices can be relatively easy to build then maintain in
solo author scenarios. Less easy with collaborative authoring and edition.
Let's expand things for a couple of minutes.
With the redesign, the invitation to
Edit this page seems to be omnipresent across articles and books (two of the three categories within
the documentation set). Whilst not
overtly side-stepping the many and varied requirements of the
FreeBSD Documentation Project (FDP):
- a GitHub-oriented workflow – Edit this page – does effectively lower the bar
– and so,
fewer people are discouraged from assisting with additions, corrections and general maintenance
☑
From the overview:
- high quality, accurate documentation is paramount
– this is inarguable. It simply will not happen consistently
and in good time without enough hands on deck.
Back to
Erichans and the shared wish for a traditionally indexed FreeBSD Handbook.
The realistic short-/mid-term alternative to two indices per book (one for short HTML, the other for long) is:
- the indexing and other features that are native to PDF
– this is partly why I envisage
prominent encouragement to install documentation, which includes PDF versions of things such as the Handbook.
… @carlavilla maybe the
Resources subsection can, eventually, expand to something like this:
…
I know, PDF is not a panacea, but it can do some of what's currently not done with HTML online.
Maybe the FDP can add HTML indices to large multi-author items in a year or two, but for the next few months, I guess, thoughts will focus on a main site refresh ahead of the thirtieth anniversary.