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Date:      Thu, 12 Dec 1996 16:57:22 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG, www@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: New composition of the FreeBSD documentation team.
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.95.961212161810.7340C-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <10411.850399767@time.cdrom.com>

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On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> Wow! :-)

Wow! :-)

General random notes, not all applicable to all people.

Most everyone on this list should have (a) and account on
freefall (and spatter after the web service migrate) and (b) have
either cvs commit rights to the www tree *or* arrange for a proxy
who has such rights.  If neither of these are case, begin
negotiation with Jordan.  The News Bureau and Advertising
Division (gallery/commercial) have things they can easily get
started on immediately.

Next, I've taken the liberty of adding everybody to the
freebsd-www@freebsd.org mailing list.

Third, I'm always available as an SGML consultant.

Fourth, What you see on www.freebsd.org comes out of the CVS
repository.  At 4:00am freefall time, every day, a `build' copy
of the pages is updated from the repository.  The pages are then
built (via makefiles, similar to the freebsd distribution itself) 
which mostly involves passing the HTML files through an SGML
validator/normalizer, and generating various things that don't
exist natively in HTML (handbook, FAQ, tutorials, ports pages,
server stats...).  This is all installed in a temporary directory
and indexed.  If all went well, the new tree is swapped in and
the old tree swapped out (but not deleted until the next build,
so there is always disaster recovery).  Generally, if someone
commits some bogus HTML or something, the build will abort at
which point I fix it and (depending on the importance of the
change) manually start a rebuild or let it wait until the next
time around. 

Fifth, to ensure mirrorability, all URLs (except a few
cgi-generated rogues) are relative.  This means that you can
easily install a test copy of the pages in your own ~/public_html
directory for testing.  In fact, if you checkout the www tree and
do a `make install', that is where it ends up by default (in a
`data' subdirectory actually, so it doesn't spam your home page). 

If you want to do this "at home", in addition to a stock freebsd
distribution, you will need James Clark's SP package, which
includes the SGML normalizer/validator.  This is a critical
component as the normalizer allows us to utilize a number of
valuable, sanity saving SGML features that cannot be used with
existing HTML browsers.  I have a port of this, but have yet to
submit it to the ports collection because of some rough edges (eg
installing documentation).  You also need the HTML dtds, which I
think I should just commit to the cvs tree for convenience.

Additionally, if you have a 2.1.6 or earlier release, you will
also need to pick up a couple things from current:

  src/usr.bin/sgmlfmt
  src/usr.bin/sgmls
  src/share/sgml

Do the appropriate `make all install' and you should be on your
way.  If you want postscript/ascii generation of the
handbook/FAQ/tutorials to work right, you also need the groff mm
macros from current. 


> Mirror Manager:		Ulf Zimmermann <ulf@Lamb.net>
> Deputy MM:		John Cavanaugh <john@bang.rain.com>

First task assignment: Find out who is the webmaster for the
mirrors currently listed on the home page and get their email
addresses added to the freebsd-www@freebsd.org mailing list. 
Second would be to draft a mirroring policy (Thou shalt run
FreeBSD and Apache.  Thou shalt run cgi scripts.  Thou shalt
syncronize with the master server once a day) and mechanism
document (Warren's rsync currently).  This should be an HTML
document in the tree, replacing the current README.html.

> Gallery/Commercial Editor:	"Charles A. Wimmer" <cawimm0@service1.uky.edu>
> Deputy GCE:			Ricardo AG <ricardag@ag.com.br>

I've got a huge backlog of gallery entries and one commercial
entry update.  Shall I forward them?  How soon can arrange to
have requests go directly to you?  (Adding them requires (1)
making sure they don't already exist in the list, possibly under
a different name, (2) verifying that they indeed either use or
support FreeBSD.)

If the gallery continues growing at the rate it is now, we may
have to re-evaluate its existance and membership criteria.

> CGI Engineer:		Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
> Deputy CGIE:		TBD

Somewhat mirror related, figure out how many of the existing
mirrors can run the cgi scripts in the current web pages
(http://www.xx.freebsd.org/cgi/ftp.cgi?foo is a simple check, it
either returns a page of FTP links, or an error).  There are some
scripts that could/should be run on the mirrors rather than
exclusively on the home server.  We need to get mirror
cooperation on this. 




-john






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