Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Handbooks moving to the wiki

[Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>]

On 14 December 2014 at 23:02, Jeff Horelick <jdhore@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 14 December 2014 at 09:22, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Sun, 14 Dec 2014 22:04:28 +0800 Ben de Groot wrote:
>> > On 14 December 2014 at 21:59, Alexander Berntsen <bernalex@gentoo.org>
>> > wrote:
>> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> > > Hash: SHA256
>> > >
>> > > On 14/12/14 14:57, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> > >> Is https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_install_guide not enough for
>> > >> your needs?
>> > > No.
>> > >
>> > > I like having a comprehensive book to lend friends and look at when
>> > > helping friends install Gentoo. This is not comprehensive enough for a
>> > > newbie.
>> >
>> > In such cases I would recommend a Live USB (or CD/DVD) that has a
>> > graphical environment, so that the user can keep a modern web browser
>> > next to a terminal window, to ease installation. In that case the wiki
>> > is perfectly usable.
>>
>> No, this is not a solution, because on particular hardware live
>> media (live usb/cd/dvd/whatever) may fail with video or gui support.
>>
>> I had such problem this year, when I had to install Gentoo from
>> LiveCD without ability to use any other host for support (reading
>> howtos, googling and so on). I used SystemRescueCD because of ample
>> set of debug, admin and analysis tools I needed to configure
>> system properly, but GUI was just a failure due to lack of nvidia
>> drivers out of the box. Of course, I can easily fix such issues
>> when fresh system is installed, but while it was being installed I
>> had to use what is available from the live media. And elinks was a
>> great help back there.
>>
>> So it will be really nice to keep handbook copies outside of wiki
>> interface. Probably a reasonable compromise will be to keep
>> handbooks at the wiki, but to use some script to generate simpler
>> htmls for out of the wiki usage scope.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Andrew Savchenko
>
>
>
> I feel like we do not need to optimize for this case really. I feel that the
> odds of installing Gentoo where you have no GUI (via either the LiveDVD or
> SystemRescueCD), no smartphone to use to look at the wiki, no tablet to use
> to look at the wiki (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in the US, you
> can get a brand-new Android tablet for $40 USD at a physical store (less
> online) and in the UK you can find them under 50GBP), no spare computers to
> use to look at the wiki are extremely unlikely.

And it's not like the wiki is unusable in a text-based browser like
elinks. It may be a little more inconvenient, but we are really
talking about corner cases here.

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer