[Bug 859372] Re: wiki describes development, not user documentation

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

The second sentence of the first paragraph of
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter> says "This document is a living
specification, describing for designers, developers, testers, and
potential contributors how USC is supposed to work." It is not, and has
never been, intended to be "useful to end users". That is why it's on
wiki.ubuntu.com, rather than help.ubuntu.com -- and why it briefly
specifies what the USC help should contain, rather than providing actual
help.

So any page linking to <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter> as if it
is user-level documentation is wrong. I have removed the link from
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareCenterFAQ>.

The page has been similarly clear that it is a specification, not help,
since June 2009, only a couple of months after the project began, and
four months *before* the release of Ubuntu Software Center 1.0. For that
reason, I think renaming the page would not help. People who link to it
as if it is help under its current address would link to it as if it is
help under its new address too. I think the only long-term cure for that
problem is to change the Ubuntu wiki theme to look unambiguously like a
contributor zone, not a user zone.

As for Ubuntu Software Center's actual help, it is deliberately vague
about what kinds of payments are accepted, because these can change on
the payment server without any update to USC itself. The help could go
into more detail about what happens when the payment is accepted,
though.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/859372

Title:
  wiki describes development, not user documentation

Status in “software-center” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  The main wiki page about Software Center (
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter ) seems to be all about
  planning and development, without much data that would be useful to
  end users.  Could this perhaps be re-organized, and some user
  documentation written?  Here is the specific request I got about it:

  [ISD Customer Support #5037]
  From: 	march at ubuntuusers.de

  Hello,
  I'm a little bit confused about the informations about the software-center in the official wiki. It contains many future options. The main thing I want to know is: how can I purchase software in detail, which payments are accepted (paypal ...), will I get a special deb://... for my sources to download software? Via Email or where will I get it? Can this software I purchased used in future releases of ubuntu too? Will there be a software-center for Kubuntu? It would be nice if you could give me detailled informations, because I want to add these missing informations to our official german wiki you can find here: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Software-Center / http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.ubuntuusers.de%2FSoftware-Center

  Regards
  Marc

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