A Fossil SCM repo for Homelabbers to collaborate!

General
21

James, that’s so true, documentation has always been hard to craft, and universally hated by programmers in general.

On top of that, ‘gifted writers’ are rare, I lived with one for 17 years and that’s how I know about the breed. She could crank out 10,000 magic words in a hour, like it was no big deal.

She made me realise that I’m not a writer, but a poor hack at best. But no one else will do my doc for me, so here we are.

In comparison to my web site, Fossil doc is made so easy using the inbuilt wiki in Html or Markdown (user choice), the editor is actually quite nice and Fossil is like Plasticine, I shape it to my desire by adding or removing toolbar menus as wanted. You may have noticed there are no ‘Chat’ or ‘Forum’ menus in that repo ?

My website was also easy to create using Sphinx.pl, but impossible to maintain over the decades as my foundational design was rubbish, however that was a ‘central control’ system, one huge monolith.

Fossil is truly distributed, someone can take my project, alter it and then distribute it as well, all the doc, all the code, the web server, everything in the one file.

Did you know the Fossil homepage is just a Fossil repo ?

With Git, if you want to include wiki’s with editor, trouble ticket system etc, you need to package separate apps with it, and that’s way too hard.

Well, it is for me, and that’s why I use fossil. I’m bone lazy ~

22

About all of that documentation that got too hard to maintain. It sounded like broken links was a big part of the overhead. Do you need help trying to identify the broken links? I might be able to help with some python scripts if there’s content there worth salvaging. It sounds like a pity to abandon so many years of work, just because you set something up before helpful tools existed to make light work of that kind of thing.

23

Thanks James, that’s very kind of you, considering how busy you must be!

However. the main subject of that whole website, namely Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth has now been abandoned by the author, so it’s fitting that my website is now locked in time and state until Sourceforge disappears eventually.

He developed a dislike for ARM Cortex-M MCU’s and a love for FPGA’s after creating arguably the best and only FLOSS embedded Forth in decades.

I’m sure that the commercial embedded Forth makers will now be very relieved.

Happily, I’m moving on to a new way of teaching folks how to use Forth to make projects, you’ve just viewed my prototype (svd2db-rel) :slight_smile:

It’s a distributed ‘ForthEmbeddedLabs’ series using Fossil as the distribution medium.

No website needed, every Lab is complete with doc, code, pictures, PDF’s, structured menus, links etc, all in the one repo file.

No adverts, politics or pleas for money, its a bit like the old internet in 1994 was, namely quiet, full of university types and thinkers, direct and to the point.

Until lawyers ruined it for money :frowning:

The Green Card Scam 1994