Aaron Griffin wrote:

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis grbzks@gmail.com wrote:

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On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 03:33:49PM -0500, Dusty Phillips wrote:

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2009/2/6 Aaron Griffin aaronmgriffin@gmail.com:

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Hey guys, I wanted to make you aware of the following: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13140

The "Official Installation Guide" is severely outdated (the wiki page still mentions "i686 optimized").

As one of the two people who was once on Arch's only attempt at an official documentation team, and as one of several people who contributed many of the first articles to the wiki, I have this to say on the topic:

Drop the official install guide.

We know our wiki is well-maintained and well organized, and it seems to do that by itself without much developer interference. Go wiki! Originally, when we first set the wiki up Dennis, Judd, and I felt that the official install guide should be more... well... official. But its out of date, its always out of date, and there are wiki texts that are not out of date. Now, seeing how our wiki experiment has exceeded our hopes and expectations, I'd say that the install guide (drop the 'official') should be community maintained as are all our wiki pages. It will improve. When its time for a release, "somebody official" should read through it, ensure its accurate, convert it to plaintext and put it on the iso.

Dusty

I agree with the above for the most part. The only "problems" with the Beginners Guide, which is the only up to date and worth of being included anywhere guide is that its too "wikified". eg. references "go here" with a link to another wiki page. It would definately take less time to convert it into something less dependant on the wiki than refactoring the official guide. Also theres references to eg. like Loui said yaourt which should probably go (?) Also the official guide is linked from all over the place. archlinux.org wiki.archlinux.org + its part of the iso. Should those change to link the beginners guide? Should the Beginners Guide change its name to the Arch Linux Handbook for example? FTR I had always been in favour of maintaining 1 guide from the beginning.

I'm for changing the name to "Arch Linux Handbook" and maintaining one guide. It seems simpler. But we should take care to include references to unofficial tools and things somewhere else - i.e. the "install yaourt" stuff

The name doesn't really matter. IMO anything we include on the official ISO becomes official documentation by default. In that context, I believe we should retain a simple how-to-install-Arch-core doc, with clear direction for users regarding where to go next i.e. the wiki. In other words, +1 for Xavier's suggestion in the bug report - a bare-bones install guide consisting of revised sections 1-3 and a very brief Pacman overview.

I have a problem with the Beginner's Guide as official documentation, as I don't believe it gives an accurate first impression of Arch. It is not compatible with Arch core principles, IMO, although I accept that it has established itself as a useful community-provided resource. I have already mentioned these reservations to Misfit, btw.

I'll have a look over dolby's latest revision, and if I have additional suggestions, post them in the bug report.

T.