Wiki Week
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Not a stupid question at all.
Maybe a good approach is that taken in fantasy/scifi worlds. There is canon (in our case documentation and project code) and things that are either not yet canonised or will not be canon, but are important. The wiki should be the place for the later. A lot of material is needed to explain Qt, and the wiki is the place for that.
This brings in the problem of how the wiki should be organised. I like the front page for being organised around things that you might do. That is a good approach, it makes finding things simpler. However too many items on a page make it harder to read and find things.
The release table appeared there a couple of days back. It makes sense to have one (we didn't previously). But probably it should be a page with a link to it from the main page. With the link probably under developing Qt.
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@Wieland said:
For example, the main page shows a table with Qt releases. Should this really be there?
@tekojo said:
The release table appeared there a couple of days back. It makes sense to have one (we didn't previously). But probably it should be a page with a link to it from the main page. With the link probably under developing Qt.
I added that table a few days ago, but didn't intend for the full table to be on the front page for long. (I didn't want to spend time creating an additional brief table then, and I was also being sneaky in trying to increase its visibility this way.)
I quite like how Ubuntu has presented their release info:
- Main page with small table: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Home
- Detailed tables: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
Would you be willing to polish that, @Wieland?
A lot of material is needed to explain Qt, and the wiki is the place for that.
I was thinking about the history of Qt. There's a very nice but very brief overview at http://qt.io/qt20 -- it would be great to expand on that. It doesn't belong in official documentation (especially the parts about old versions), but would be right at home in the wiki.
This brings in the problem of how the wiki should be organised. I like the front page for being organised around things that you might do. That is a good approach, it makes finding things simpler. However too many items on a page make it harder to read and find things.
Agreed.
I think the following would be helpful for the main page:
- Make the Release Info table briefer, move the full table elsewhere (and expand it -- it's not complete yet)
- Move less important links into their "Overview" pages to declutter the main page
- Use boxes and icons for visual grouping (I find a long hierarchical list hard to read)
Related to organization, we also need to overhaul the Categories system. There are too many single-member categories.
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Hello everyone,
I've made some changes to the main page. I haven't actually deleted anything but mostly created a handful of new pages and moved stuff there. Of course it's far from being complete but I think one can get an idea of what my intentions are. I would be happy to get some feedback from you before I go on.
Cheers!
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Looks good, easier to read than before
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@Wieland said:
Hello everyone,
I've made some changes to the main page. I haven't actually deleted anything but mostly created a handful of new pages and moved stuff there. Of course it's far from being complete but I think one can get an idea of what my intentions are. I would be happy to get some feedback from you before I go on.
Cheers!
It's much tidier than before. I like it! Thanks!
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Hi guys!
I'm currently gathering information needed to improve the "Supported Platforms" page. By now it is more or less repeating what is already stated here and here. I would like to add some info that is hard to find elsewhere and I need some help: What platforms is Qt known to work on that are not supported either by The Qt Company or the community? E.g. I know that one can use it on FreeBSD. What else do we have? What about the other *BSDs, OpenIndiana, Haiku? What about VxWorks? VxWorks runs on all industrial robots made by Kuka (very big market share). And it drives the NASA mars rovers. Another thing is gaming consoles: Are there any for that one can write games with Qt? What about stuff like home automation, car entertainment systems, machine tools or process automation?
Cheers!
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@Wieland, good questions.
- Repetitions: We should try to minimize repetitions. The wiki could simply provide links to the official docs.
- Platforms: I don't know much about this topic, but...
- http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/supported-platforms.html mentions VxWorks, which is supported via the commercial license IIRC (so I'm not sure why it's in the "Community Supported Platforms" page).
- Someone's working on a Haiku port: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/qt_53_haiku_progress
- Gaming consoles: I haven't heard of anyone doing that, but Windows 10 is coming to the XBox One so we might be able to get it to work there with minimal effort.
- Home/process automation, car entertainment:
- There are key focuses of the Qt World Summit this year: https://www.qtworldsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/QtWS15_CallForPapers_May312015.pdf
- See also http://www.qt.io/case-navico/ and http://www.qt.io/case-panasonic/
- Process automation: My day job is to develop industrial measurement and control systems. A key component of these systems are the industrial communication protocols, which Qt itself doesn't provide (except Qt Serial Port). My company uses LabVIEW which has good support for these protocols and other features that target industrial systems. However, I have used Qt to implement the GUI for 1 project so far, where the client wanted a fancy, flexible GUI -- this is where Qt outshines LabVIEW.
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Hello @JKSH,
thank you very much for your extensive reply and the links! Regarding repetitions: Agreed. I will remove these parts from the wiki. Haiku : Awesome! Didn't know the guys were that near to a working port.
Thanks again!
Bye! -
IIRC, the PS3 could run linux (Yellow Dog Linux if memory serves well but also OpenSuse and Ubuntu) at least the original systems but not the latest iterations. The latest firmware also disabled that possibility but if the OS had X running, then Qt was probably supported.
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Hi everyone!
While I'm cutting my way through the wiki I'm wondering what's the difference between a snippet, a howto, a demo and an example? Any ideas? :-) -
Hi,
I'd say demos and examples are pretty much the same with the difference that an example shows/explains basic concepts and a demo goes further. I see a snippet being a code sample that you can easily reuse in your project e.g. a sorting algorithm for Qt's container class. Howto should be a an example/demo with complete explanation on how to do a given task/solve a given problem.
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@SGaist Thanks. That sounds sane. The problem with this regarding the wiki is that only a few people seem to have a clue about this classification and thus the coresponding categories get mixed up. I'm looking for an easy to understand definition of the terms so that we can put it on the wiki to help people finding the right category for their content.
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@JKSH said:
Related to organization, we also need to overhaul the Categories system. There are too many single-member categories.
I managed to get rid of about 80% of them. Now it's up to the admins to delete the remaining 171 (!) unused categories... :-)
Edit: I think by now categories are a big pain in the arse: They are hard to maintain because only admins can move them and it seems that everyone thinks that his/her article needs to be a category by its own. IMAO we need some very strict policy to fight this.
Edit2: Maybe we should rethink the categories system and use it a bit differently than intended by its inventors. Category pages are in some way stupid because one cannot localize them because there is always only one category page and the suffix-stuff doesn't work there. But: The content that is automatically generated there is language agnostic to users who are logged in. What if we forbid the manual editing of category pages by policy and give the suffix /en to all English content? I'm not sure yet if this is a good idea. Honestly, I tend to think this would be a dirty workaround. I still think that dedicated mediawikis in subdomains would be much cleaner. What do you think?
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@Wieland a huge thank you for going through the wiki. The front page looks so much better now. (and looking at the edit list, a lot of other places too!)
The subdomains are technically complicated (and looking after the backend makes me hate everything technically complicated :) )
I'll take it upon myself to go and delete unused categories, or maybe I'll make you a full admin...
The category mess is partly from the past two (or maybe more?) migrations the wiki has been through. -
@tekojo Hi, thank you very much!
Regarding subdomains: Maybe I was a bit to enthusiastic about localization. After this weekend of looking at quite a number of wiki articles I must say that I'm somewhat disappointed by the quantity and quality of localized articles.
Regarding the deletion of unused categories: I think we should wait one or two weeks to give interested parties time to raise their voices against this or that nomination. From a statistical point of view I'm pretty sure I made some mistakes and nominated stuff for deletion that should be kept. You said you considered making me a full admin. I don't know if this is a good idea. I'm new here and don't know anyone in the community yet. I think this had the potential to cause unnecessary trouble.
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@Wieland ok, then I'll secretly add you to the admin list one day, when I forget that you didn't want to be there. Or tell me when you feel more at home, and I'll add rights :)
The translations have been done at different times and might not have been updated when the original has been updated.
