wiki for me but not for thee (was CFD Project Lilliput)

[John Rose]

On Mar 9, 2021, at 10:55 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie <magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-03-09 19:11, John Rose wrote:
>> While it would be better to use a wiki somewhere
>> for collaborative edits, there aren’t any good options
>> under ojn for this (due to inconvenient rules for
>> authoring the wiki).
> Which, while being a side-track, is really annoying. How come we cannot setup infrastructure that helps, instead of hinders, the OpenJDK community from making collaborative efforts? :-(

The wiki rules are unfortunately specified in the oj
rules, which themselves are unfortunately hard to
change.  (That’s my understanding; to be corrected
by advice from those who know better.)  So now
the current workaround is to work hard to make
folks into HotSpot group members, one at a time,
using the clumsy and time-consuming voting
procedure.   One might not know it, but one is
probably not a HotSpot group member, and that
doesn’t matter at all, except for wiki authoring
privileges.  Every “new fish” who joins and wants
to add their (extremely useful!!) notes to the wiki
for the next “new fish” gets blocked on this and
gives up.  I’ve seen it happen many times.
(Not to be grumpy about it or anything…)

So I use my cr.ojn pages vigorously, because
as a committer I automatically have editing
rights.  It’s a glass more than half full, while
the wiki is a glass more than half empty,
except for those who happen to have been
through the one-off voting-in process.

>> So cr.ojn is a good start, and
>> when the project boots up you can have a notes
>> file (or files) in the repo itself.
> 
> An alternative is to create an empty branch in jdk-sandbox, add a README.md file, and edit it. This way every OpenJDK Author can contribute, changes are attributed to the right person, and you'll get a change history as well. And you get markdown code and realtime html rendering by Github.

Yes, nice workaround!  But, doesn’t the sandbox
get cleaned sometimes?

— John