[RFC] Software and Hardware pages...

[samueldr]

Hi!

I'm already thinking about how hardware and software articles should be organized, and possibly written.

I'm proposing, and it's really a proposition, that we segregate non-nix and non-nixos pages for software and hardware into (pseudo-)namespaces Hardware: and Software:.

This will make the page names a bit busier, with names like Software: Foo Bar Baz, but this will make pages list easier to comb through. Existing pages for a topic can be redirected to the namespace, and these redirects hidden from the pages list. Links can be made to not show the namespace [[Software: Foo Bar Baz|foo bar baz]].

This is a bit redundant with Categories, BUT, there is one thing that categories can't to: categorize non-categorized pages. The titles categorizing the pages will make it more obvious what kind of page it is. Looking at the pages list it will be easier to see non-namespaced pages. Furthermore, huge categories can become a bit clumsy with mediawiki.

Now, don't take this as a proposal to prefix everything with Something:. This is not a good idea. I think this applies only to extremely broad topics like these two, since it's in some ways intertwined with how a distribution works.

Pros

• Cleanly splits wiki into topics for foreign knowledge
• Implicitly describes a page
• Automatically disambiguate topics.

Cons

• Busier page titles
• Longer to write

Definitions

Foreign knowledge

Knowledge about things not explicitly related to Nix and NixOS. These might be the kind of tips and tricks you see on other Linux distributions wikis.

Software article

An article about software that is not nix-specific, but which is used to present both generic information and configuration and nix-specific particularities of said software.

Example software page topics:

• Google Chrome
• Chromium
• AwesomeWM
• Apache HTTPD

This targets both server-oriented and desktop-oriented software.

Hardware article

An article about hardware. This can be either a complete (branded, non-custom) computer, or a particular hardware peripheral. Some hardware is generic enough to warrant a common page.

Example hardware page topics:

• Acer C720
• Raspberry Pi 3
• NVIDIA GPU
• USB Audio interfaces

[Mic92]

I don't see ambiguity at the moment between hardware/software topics in titles. Wikipedia has a different scheme, when title collide for some reason: Chromium (Software) - however I don't expect this happen to often in our wiki. Some topics might be also in multiple categories.

[makefu]

IMHO as of right now there is no need to put namespaces for these specific instances.

Right now we have 4 namespaces:

• FAQ
• NixOS_on_ARM
• Packaging
• Nixpkgs

If there are more such instances where articles should be bundled we can introduce them ad-hoc. The Subsection index can be used to find all articles below like this:

{{Special:PrefixIndex/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/ |hideredirects=1 |stripprefix=1}}