Retain the FAQ?

[aturon]

The FAQ on the old web site is a pretty enormous resource that was always relatively buried. We need to figure out how that fits in the new web site.

[ashleygwilliams]

i actually kinda strongly want to get rid of the FAQ. to me it felt like it was growing a bunch and wasn't super helpful. we have so many audiences that their frequently asked questions..are well, it's hard to make and maintain one. i would much rather grow sets of books - if different teams e.g. the lang team wanted to keep and maintain an FAQ i think that sounds good, but i dont think it's good to maintain on the website.

[aturon]

We shouldn't lose the FAQ altogether -- it's gone through an enormous set of iterations and has some really helpful material. But I agree that it makes more sense to separate out more like we do for books, and put it under the purview of the Docs Team rather than the site itself.

[ashleygwilliams]

strong agree on not losing the content @aturon i think it could be a good book on its own, or perhaps there are good elements that could make FAQs for different team books (that may or may not yet exist). i just dont think maintaining it on the website makes sense at the scale it's currently at.

[sendilkumarn]

Or do you think that we should have a light-weight FAQ page? Focusing only on the website's main target users and re-directing others.

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I think it could make sense to have a short FAQ page that mostly just directs people to various books; kind of like the bookshelf but worded in a Q&A format perhaps?

[Centril]

Maybe we could have a per-team FAQ?

[ashleygwilliams]

@Centril i think that's an OK idea but i can imagine that teams may struggle to keep it maintained. in general- i think this is something the docs team should own (cc @steveklabnik) and that we can link to from the site, but should not be content maintained on the site.

[ashleygwilliams]

assuming the docs team is open to managing this, i would like to close this issue as it will then become an issue for the docs team to handle.

[Centril]

@ashleygwilliams

i think this is something the docs team should own

That's seems OK; There are some team policy notes (e.g. wrt. the globality of inference, ...) in the FAQ tho but I suppose that the lang team or other teams can work together with the docs team on this if and when team policies change.

we can link to from the site, but should not be content maintained on the site.

I absolutely agree with this. :) The location is much less important than the content being available.

[steveklabnik]

Personal bias alert: I really don't like FAQs. It's also been a real maintenance burden in the past.

There is some useful information there though...

[alilleybrinker]

My two cents: the FAQ has a ton of useful information, but collecting it all here makes it not particularly accessible. Examples:

• Information about specific APIs ("How do I do O(1) character access in a String?") is great, but also should probably be in those API docs.
• Some of the questions ("What is the difference between passing by value, consuming, moving, and transferring ownership" or "What is a deref coercion and how does it work?") probably belong in Rust books.
• Others ("How do I configure Cargo to use a proxy?") probably belong on Stack Overflow.

I had a great time working on the first version of the FAQ, and I think it's been a worthwhile effort and resource, but it's also probably run its course.

[skade]

Question here: the FAQ was pretty much a grab-bag of information, but were those questions really that frequent? The current iteration of the FAQ is also often subtly wrong and very unmaintained (e.g. it still documents that Mozilla might use Rust in Firefox in the future). The FAQ was useful when we didn't have much, now we have multple and we have spread a lot of the info across the page.

I believe that information that ends up in an FAQ is actually searching it's place at a better location.

After 6 months of no movement, I would like to move to closing this issue.

[Centril]

@skade I think at least it would be good to archive the FAQ in some repo such that the information isn't lost such that we can reuse the material in other places.

[pietroalbini]

Well, I don't think we're going to delete the old website's repository.

[Centril]

@pietroalbini Then it's all good. :)

[skade]

The old page is always available at https://prev.rust-lang.org. If anyone reads this and has the time, https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html is the location of the old FAQ and it would be interesting to go through it and figure out which information is valuable to move it somewhere :).