Until 2005 or 2006, the LDP history is given here

Out of Date

To have a wiki or not to have one was for many years a Loch Ness Snake on the LDP mailing lists. Often asked for, never accepted (for good reasons). But things change...

Somewhere on May 2008, the LDP was pretty hardly challenged because most HOWTOs where out of date. Most of the authors where unjoinable. Some people where concerned by an eventual disparition of the LDP and tried to setup a new team.

New team

It's like this that jdd (Jean-Daniel Dodin) was proposed to become the LDP coordinator. Truth is that there where no competition :-(, so he accepted and began building a new community around a new wiki interface. Two dates where given as objectives: underframe working before January 2009 and HOWTOs updated before the end of 2009.

Rick Moen, David lawyer, Sergiusz Pawlowicz, Svetoslav Petkov Chukov, Martin Wheeler, Robert Spencer, Susmit Shannigrahi, Senthil Kumaran, Randy Kramer, Allister Gearon (no order) and many others where the most present on the mailing list at the moment. Greg Fergusson was still, as always, the script and docbook guru, listening on the submit list.

The Wiki way

The staff first work was to make the wiki usable. At this time, most posts on the wiki was spam. Using a captcha on the edit box got rid of this. Spam is now pretty rare on the wiki.

Then we had to validate the choice of the MoinMoin wiki engine. As time goes on, this choice prove better and better. The MoinMoin engine is very robust. Python powered, it's less prone to attacks than PHP ones and it's docbook compliant.

On November 2008, the wiki was proven able to give acceptable docbook exports so that the previous and very well working toolchain (docbook->any kind of reading format) could be preserved. The LDP builds on rock solid underlying organisation.

Ah! je ris de me voir si belle...

On the same time, updating and controlling the many LDP mirrors was on good way, thanks to Allister. We could also begin browsing the HOWTO list.

Allow Editing

The licence problem was on the way. Many HOWTOs don't have any licence and the boilerplate LDP licence didn't ask to allow editing by other people than the maintainer, now often unjoinable. A long discussion allows us to choose a default licence (GFDL) and to accept without problem some other free licences, discussion with the author allowing even more solutions. Then we could begin copying the HOWTOs.