[3073] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Who owns the "help" locker?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin M. Cunningham)
Thu Dec 27 19:05:04 2001
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Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 19:05:01 -0500
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
From: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@MIT.EDU>
Cc: accounts@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu, ganderso@mit.edu,
cfyi@mit.edu
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At 11:27 PM +0000 12/27/01, Bill Cattey wrote:
>When I go to
> http://web.mit.edu/help
>I get the locker for the long-defunct development locker to write a help
>system for Athena.
>
>Perhaps it's time we renamed that to help-dev and made web.mit.edu/help
>useful to end users?
>
>The first step is to find out who owns the locker and secure their
>permission to do this.
>
>-wdc
Not sure who "owns" it, technically, but, as you would guess, I have
a stake in it, Athena Pubs having been the primary customer of the
development. I believe Lucien van Elsen created it for the dev side
of the OLH project, which was sponsored by Athena Pubs (i.e., me
basically, as the project leader of OLH). Does that make the owner
Pubs -- or Athena dev? I imagine "both".
Anyway, you're right: OLH as a program is long-defunct (replaced by a
simple shell script that starts up netscape at the olh tree), and it
makes sense to move this unused code to a less central place. I'm
sure we thought about freeing the help locker long ago but knew that
we didn't want to get rid of all that work, if only for historical
reasons. I can't recall why it didn't occur to us to just change the
name -- I think it had something to do with fear that any references
from other places would get broken, etc. I believe you're right that
it might be time to acknowledge that the help locker is now an
artifact not a living thing, so after 7 years it could be renamed
help-dev and be done with without disturbing links, the build tree,
or whatever (it would make sense for someone to check for any
lingering dependencies)....
As for the use that might be made of the newly-liberated
web.mit.edu/help address, was there something specific you were
thinking of? I can imagine a bunch of folks who'd like to use such a
central name (among others: Athena Pubs, Support in general, WCS, and
the folks who run web.mit.edu).
I know several years ago we was scouring web.mit.edu for short locker
names for the general information repository that the Self-Help team
had recommended be started (still only partially implemented as
web/is/help, web/is/pubs, and the Product Support Sheets). I thought
"help" would be excellent, as would "info", but they were both taken.
Were you thinking "web.mit.edu/help" would be nice as the natural
help page for the web.mit.edu server, or did you have something else
in mind?
--Kevin
