[proposal] Package Wiki Server

Dear all, 

As I have mentioned several times in IRC, I have a new proposal. The details are below.

[ PROPOSAL ]

Package Wiki

[ WHAT WE NEED TO DO ]

1. Set up a MediaWiki for documenting about packages

2. Set up multiple languages (like en.wikipedia.org and ja.wikipedia.org)

3. May be linked from our package database website

[ PURPOSE ]

1. Users can write how to use the package

2. Multiple languages can be supported, and they are lined to one another

[ CONS ]

1. Most packages may stay without any text

2. Some packages may be flooded with complaints and lengthy error messages.

[ DETAILS ]

Many users write about Fink packages in their blogs, wiki or other forms. You know Amazon's or AppStore's Review, so you know these information will be more useful when they are gathered in one place. For example, I installed Arora-mac, but I couldn't find the binary until I did `dpkg -c /path/to/arora-mac*.deb'. But imagine the users who don't know dpkg. Generally speaking, Unix users are exposed to "RTFM" comments, but many Mac users are not. Users can also upload screenschots and etc to show how to use the package.

The detailed descriptions will be available in other languages, which is good for the users who are not comfortable with reading lots of English texts. Another reason is that some information is useful only for certain languages. Many tools still have problems with handling multibyte encodings. For example, the current version of unison, a file synchronization tool, has problems with synchronization between UTF-8-MAC and UTF-8 (the upstrea's developer version now has an option to handle this).

As far as I understand from Wikipedia, MediaWiki is very flexible and can do many things, such as redirecting postgresql* to postgresql.

The information may not cover only the information of Fink packages, but also of other distribution system, or even on other platforms. 

I think this service will help both beginner users and experienced users find Fink easy to use.