Chapter 10. Mailing Lists, Newsgroups and CVS Modules

The XML content of documentation files is updated from day to day, and on busy days from hour to hour. To follow the updates in the English tree and participate in general discussions related to the PHP documentation, it is highly recommended that you subscribe to the <[email protected]> mailing list. You can subscribe by sending a blank mail to [email protected]. Similarly you can unsubscribe by sending a blank mail to [email protected]. There is a web interface for these tasks at http://www.php.net/mailing-lists

There are also separate mailing lists for translation groups, where native language discussions may go on and where language specific CVS commits are posted to. These mailing lists are named in the form of doc-LANGCODE where LANGCODE is the same language code used in the CVS module name. You can subscribe to / unsubscribe from these mailing lists the same way as above explained, substituting phpdoc in the email addresses with your list name. A sample list name is doc-zh for the Simplified Chinese list.

Currently these lists (including the main phpdoc list) receive messages from the following senders:

• Members of the list: discussion threads about anything related to the phpdoc team.

• The CVS server: diffs about every small modification in the corresponding module's XML files. This means that the phpdoc list receives the English file modification commits and other support file's modifications, while other lists only receive the language specific commits.

• Other senders: posting to the list is not restricted, so people not on the list can also post messages. This way we can receive reports and suggestions by plain mail on the list.

• The PHP bug tracking system: bug follow-ups classified as "Documentation Problem" are posted to the phpdoc list.

• SPAM: this is not a common piece of mail, thanks to our SPAM protection system. :)

As there are many posters to the lists including some automatic postings (bugs, cvs commits) you should only subscribe to those lists in which you are interested in. We recommend that if you only work on the English version, you only subscribe to the phpdoc list. If you are also a member of a translation group, then you should subscribe to the translation's mailing list too, after subscribing to phpdoc. Reading the main mailing list's mails at least enables you to know what is going on in the English tree, what needs to be updated, and what is changed in the build system.

You should be able to handle the traffic of the mailing lists you are subscribed to, but just in case you need to go for a long summer break, and you need to unsubscribe, there are other methods to read the messages after you come back:

• Read the messages on the web, in the archives at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=phpdoc (this only works for the main phpdoc list!).

• Download the messages with a news reader at news://news.php.net/php.doc.

• Read the messages on the web, with the news interface at http://news.php.net/group.php?group=php.doc.

The commit messages coming from the CVS server, that are larger then 8kb, are put into attachments. You can always see the commit message and file list in the body, but the diff is in an attachment.

The Windows HTMLHelp Edition of the manual has a separate mailing list for CHM related discussions and announcements. You can subscribe to this mailing list at http://www.php.net/mailing-lists using the web interface.

There is also a mailing list named php-notes. You can access it the same way as the phpdoc list (just substitute phpdoc with php-notes). This list is the place where all the manual notes are posted. You may consider subscribing to this mailing list if you would like to help manage the notes. See the next section for more information on note editing guidelines.

There is also a list named doc-license, which is set up for those who would like to get involved in the process of deciding who can do what with the PHP manual. The common rule is that, in addition to the rules set forth in the license, we try to get people publishing modified versions of the manual to contribute some improvements into the manual, fix errors they find, etc. You can subscribe to this list as described at Chapter 10.

Finally, the doc.php.net site is forming on the doc-web mailing list. This site is supposed to be the meeting point for documentation authors of any of the projects developed on PHP.net.

The following table documents the relations between the different CVS modules, websites, mailing lists and newsgroups. Note that not all documentation sources are built to be available online.