Bug 44181 - www "Release Information" organization
Summary: www "Release Information" organization
Status: Closed Overcome By Events
Alias: None
Product: Documentation
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Books & Articles (show other bugs)
Version: Latest
Hardware: Any Any
: Normal Affects Only Me
Assignee: freebsd-doc (Nobody)
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2002-10-17 23:10 UTC by Gary W. Swearingen
Modified: 2023-04-10 13:38 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:


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Description Gary W. Swearingen 2002-10-17 23:10:01 UTC
At www.freebsd.org, the organization of information related to getting
and installing FreeBSD (other than the confusingly-labeled "Current"
version) is rather poor, making it unnecessarily hard to find.  It also
omits some related introductory information to give newbies a clue.

(The fix involves swapping some info between two pages, adding a little
introductory info to one, and changing a couple links on the home page.)

1) The listing of "release" documents is spread across these two pages:
    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html "Release Information"
    http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes.html       "Release Documentation"
and mixed (on both pages) with some information about the releases
themselves (as opposed to being about the release documentation).

2) The home page's "Documentation" menu doesn't have an entry for the
release documentation while the "Software" menu has a link to a page
which says little about software (it's almost all about documentation).
The two OS-related links under "Software" are also sorely lacking in
introductory material and so are rude to newbies.  Finally, that
"Software" menu would be easier to navigate with the software divided
into "base OS" and "application/ports/packages" sub-categories (eg,
by just having two such links instead of the current three).

================

Fix: 

The general idea is to make relnotes.html cover the release docs
and make releases/index.html cover the base OS software release:

On the home page, replace the "Getting FreeBSD" and "Release
Information" links under "Software" with one link to releases/index.html
labeled "Base OS" or "Base Operating System" or "Operating System" or
or "FreeBSD OS" or "Base FreeBSD OS" or "Base OS Distributions" or ...
Under "Documentation", add a link to relnotes.html as "Release Docs".

Move from releases/index.html the "Current Releases" and "Past Releases"
sections into the "RELEASE versions of FreeBSD" section of
relnotes.html, removing that section's first paragraph.

Rework the remaining "Future Releases" section of releases/index.html
to remove the redundant schedule information but say that the schedule
is at releng/index.html .

Add to the same page an "Introduction" section with a brief introduction
of the concept of "distributions" and "releases", etc. and refer to the
handbook's section on the subject.  Add another section on "Getting
FreeBSD" with a brief intro to getting FreeBSD distributions and refer
to the handbook's with the "Getting FreeBSD" link now on the home page.
How-To-Repeat: n/a
================
Comment 1 Gary W. Swearingen freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2005-10-07 19:46:32 UTC
State Changed
From-To: open->analyzed

I'll try to fix the problems. 


Comment 2 Gary W. Swearingen freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2005-10-07 19:46:32 UTC
Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-www->garys

I'll take it.
Comment 3 Mark Linimon freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2006-01-28 20:05:18 UTC
Responsible Changed
From-To: garys->freebsd-www

Assignee has asked to resign his commit bit, so return this one to pool.
Comment 4 Gabor Kovesdan freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2007-02-01 21:25:38 UTC
State Changed
From-To: analyzed->open

Open for the wide publicity again.
Comment 5 Remko Lodder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2009-11-05 13:13:02 UTC
Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-www->re

I think this is more something for the RE team...
Comment 6 Eitan Adler freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-12-31 07:58:38 UTC
For bugs matching the following criteria:

Status: In Progress Changed: (is less than) 2014-06-01

Reset to default assignee and clear in-progress tags.

Mail being skipped
Comment 7 Sergio Carlavilla Delgado freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2023-04-10 13:38:05 UTC
We can close this, this PR was opened 21 years ago and the situation is another.