Proposal: remove 'last updated' date from rendered page
 

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 06:19:53PM +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 4:44 PM, Jan Kundrát <jkt@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Camille Huot wrote:
> >>
> >> As a workaround, I would suggest to bump the date when an old document
> >> has been checked, tested and certified with current material.
> >
> > If I were yoswink, I'd kill you for such a change.
>
> OMG they killed Cam !!

Not yet. But if someone touch the date for such proposes I will start
with the fingers and finish with the toes =).

If we want to add metadata about checked/certified then we should use a
separate tag. The date tag is for what it is.

>
> And, to be on-topic: I'd rather keep the current system. Using a
> "touch" way is imo pointless and more prone to issues (for instance,
> fix a language typo on an outdated document shouldn't bump the date
> nor version as the document is still outdated).

No way of use "touch" for this *shrug*. I've ordered to my slaves that:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~yoswink/tmp/prepare-the-thing.jpg

> Removing the date will silence people who say documents are outdated
> (when they are not) but will probably create voices that would like to
> see a "last modified" date.

Yup, fix a problem creating another is a bad way to go.

> In my opinion, documents should always have a "last modified" date. If
> you want some sort of document lifecycle, you might want to introduce
> a revision period (for instance, every vital doc should be revised
> every 3 months, every other doc every year) and add in two headers:
> "last revision" and "next revision date"...

This belongs to another thread/discussion to me, since it seems like a
new feature. Maybe too much to fix this problem.

--
Jose Luis Rivero <yoswink@gentoo.org>
Gentoo/Doc Gentoo/Alpha

Proposal: remove 'last updated' date from rendered page
 

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 07:14:44PM -0700, Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hi guys. I dunno about you, but I'm getting tired of folks bashing our docs
> as being "out of date", "stale", "old", or "inaccurate" just because of the
> displayed date of the last update.
>
> I propose that we keep the date inside the document code, for our own
> internal purposes, but remove it from the final rendered page.

As swift has said in previous posts, keep the last change date visible is
a quite useful while reading documentation.

>
> As you know, the date displayed has little relevance to when we last
> actually touched-up the document, given our internal date bump policy.
>

Or I'm missing something or the date should reflect the date of the last
doc version.

>
> So. There's my proposal. Thoughts?
>

What about change 'Updated' to 'Last Change' being 'Last Change' a link
which point to an entry in the FAQ explaining what is the last change
and why it doesn't imply that the doc is out of date.

Regards.

--
Jose Luis Rivero <yoswink@gentoo.org>
Gentoo/Doc Gentoo/Alpha

Proposal: remove 'last updated' date from rendered page
 

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 18:33 +0200, Camille Huot wrote:
> In fact, if I understand correctly the terms of use of the Gentoo name
> and logo (http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/name-logo.xml), such sites (if
> not illegal by using gentoo in their domainname) HAVE to state
> explicitly that they're not official Gentoo.

That is correct. An even better solution would be to have the
guidelines amended to enforce an obvious distinction between official
Gentoo documentation. I consistently have to remind people that
gentoo-wiki is not owned, run, or maintained by Gentoo and has no
official affiliation, at all.

For example, on the main http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page page, the
notice about not being official is *tiny* and almost hidden in
comparison to the other information on the page. Pick any other page,
such as http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/Doom and you see no disclaimer,
anywhere. While I do not believe that those guys are intentionally
trying to fool anyone, as they've been very understanding and helpful
any time I've dealt with them, it still does a disservice to Gentoo's
users. By the way, not having the disclaimer on every page *is* a
violation, AFAICR.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Developer
wolf31o2.org