A new wiki for v4l

[David Liontooth <liontooth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The people over at LinuxTV are generously offering to set up a wiki for us,
but they need a team of people willing to make the first contributions and
to be responsible for keeping an eye on the site and keeping it free for
wiki spam.

Right off the bat, I suggest we plan to require contributors to log in 
to edit
pages, as is currently the case in the LinuxTV (DVB) wiki, to keep wiki spam
at bay. Login is fast and easy and shouldn't deter a genuine contributor.
Johannes, is that cool?

So Kevin, thank you for nudging everyone towards realizing this by
offering to set up a wiki. I think this is a better long-term solution --
linuxtv is sure to stay around, and v4l with them. Given that, would you be
willing to be part of the team keeping an eye on it? For your first article,
it would be useful if you would write up your experience so far and
what needs to be done still to get your card to work.

Jerome, what about you? Can you commit to writing one article to get us
going, and to help keep an eye on the site?

Alex, you obviously have lots of experience with this -- would you consider
picking one topic near and dear to your heart -- perhaps about the
potential for integrating v4l and dvb -- and write it up as a starting 
piece?

Jay, even though you've been a 'listener' -- I thought the word was 
'lurker' ;-)
would you be up to helping out on this project?

And Verbavolant, who suggested we go where we're now going, are you
willing to chip in on a moderately sustained basis? In the long run, as John
Maynard Keynes said, we'll all be dead, but by the time we tire of helping
out others will step in.

I'm mentioning these guys just because they created the momentum to
actually do a wiki. We need everyone involved.  First of all we need
someone to take care of the aesthetics -- which logo / image should we use
for the site? Second, we need someone to create a links page to existing
resources -- anyone willing to take that on? That involves assessing
whether the resource is maintained and permanent, and if not, consider
copying the content over to the wiki, while giving the source.

We also need someone to craft the introductory materials, modeled on
the other two wikis or similar ones (or not -- there's creative license 
here).

And we need someone to set up a table of content that structures the
whole site. Michel Bardiaux, would you be willing to do that? This is
pretty critical to get us off to a good start; I'd be happy to work with
you on this.

A primary task is to create an inventory of existing drivers and driver
projects, so if you're involved in one of those, take steps to feature your
work prominently on the wiki. Some driver projects, such as ivtv, now
have their own wikis, so all we need is a summary and some links.

And for everyone, we need brief and instructive recipes for getting
a card operational. This is the core purpose of the wiki. Here's a chance
for every one of us who has struggled with this to put that knowledge
to good use.

Finally, for the oldtimers, and in particular for Gerd Knorr, who has been
maintaining and developing the bulk of the core code for several years now,
please use this wiki to put down what you know before you walk into the
sunset (preferably long before).

There's a pretty sizeable community here, so if everyone would
please make a note to write up a brief piece about their area of
expertise, we'll soon be mentioned in the Encyclopedia Brittannia
-- and we know this isn't a joke anymore.

This needn't be a lot of work for any one of us. In fact the whole point of
the wiki is to save us all time -- to be able to have newcomers go to 
the wiki
and find the answer to their excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring and yet
endlessly idiosyncratic questions, and not scream in desperation on the
list, complaining about how cold and heartless we all are.

In brief, please respond to this message and tell Johannes that we want
to do this, that there's sufficient commitment to move it along and make
it worthwhile. Frankly shouldn't take us long to be better off than where
we are now.

Cheers,
Dave

BTW I run a growing capture project (as a side act) at a major university
in the City of Angels, but I'm pretty much a newbie to all this stuff. I 
just
think the lack of a v4l wiki is a major weak point in free software, and I
suffered from not getting help when I really needed it.






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