Re: [Tails-ux] Ever-growing blueprint/ directory on the webs…

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Ever-growing blueprint/ directory on the website
intrigeri:
> Once this was done, the most concerning remaining directory is
> wiki/src/blueprint/: it's not that big yet, but it seems that
> not-so-small binary files are being added there on a regular basis.
> If we go on this way, I'm concerned that we may be back to square one
> in a couple years, with a giant Git repo that's a pain for new
> contributors to initially clone and push.


I also noticed that when I browsed the repo for big files.

> The aforementioned not-so-small binary files that are being added into
> this directory on a regular basis are mostly about UX work. IMO, our
> Git repository is not an appropriate place to store an ever-growing
> stack of binary files. I'd rather avoid having to go through the
> painful process of rewriting the Git history again, so let's try to
> find a solution before it becomes a problem :)
>
> So, my question is: what tools and infrastructure do you need to store
> these files elsewhere?
>
> Some initial questions to discuss this might be:
>
> * Who currently adds stuff in there?


I do. I added a bunch of:

- PNG images for the new Greeter (alan did as well)
- Plain SVG for the new Greeter as well (alan did as well)
- Flat ODG for the bootstrapping process (tchou did as well)

> * Do they use Git, or the web interface?


We do that through Git.

> * Who would want to add stuff in there but is blocked by the current
> flow (Git or slightly sub-optimal web interface)?


I don't know.

> * Do you need revision control?


For SVG and flat ODG, they are not binary files but XML files. So we
could use version control, do merges, etc. We do it rarely in practice
but that was in my mind when I choose to use flat ODG and not something
else.

But for the Greeter for example, we also used Redmine to store
attachments. So we could set an informal rule to push text and XML to
Git, and binary images to Redmine. The biggest SVG file called
greeter-flow.png probably inlines several PNG files and that's why it
got bigger.

> * Assuming you still want to use blueprint/* as a wiki, what kind of
> linkage between blueprints and binary files stored elsewhere do you
> need? Would blueprint -> external attachments be good enough?


We need to be able to insert those binary images into the blueprints.
I'm not sure ikiwiki knows how to do that for remote URLs but in the
worse case we can do that through HTML.