"Shouldn't the there be a way for a new user to download OACS onto a
non-Internet connected computer and still be able to learn the system (i.e. have docs be downloadable)?"
How did they download OpenACS without an internet-connected computer? That seems to be a contradiction to me.
I obviously didn't say that documentation shouldn't be available for download in any form. I just said that it should be separate from the "main" tarball. Every packaging system on Linux, for example, creates separate packages for documentation.
"I can be convinced that the docs might not belong in the main tarball, but then we need to be very clear on the download page that a complete download of OACS includes two tarballs."
It's pretty simple, actually. If I am a new user and I come to the OpenACS download page, I'll be presented with the following:
OpenACS-4.6.tar.gz
OpenACS-4.6-core-documentation.tar.gz
Unless I'm someone who can't understand English, that should be pretty obvious that if I need the documentation (because I'm a new user), then I should download it as well.
In fact, this way is more APM-like. acs-core-docs is just a package, one that colud have its own release schedule as well, although it needs to be pretty close to core releases. AFAIK, that's the direction we're moving to.
"I recognize no one that uses OACS today would need such instructions, but I think our audience for downloading OACS should be new users, not all the same people who already use OACS."
I don't think all OpenACS users today are old timers. There are plenty of recent bboard messages to attest to that fact. New or old users should not be forced to download several megabytes more in documentation if they don't want to.
