Future of the Packaging Guide

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On 19/09/2007, Daniel Holbach <daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Jordan Mantha started the discussion about moving the Packaging Guide
> from DocBook in the Doc Team SVN to the Ubuntu wiki:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2007-September/002290.html
{snip}

> === Cons ===
>
>       * probably no nice printable version

You don't get a nice printable version with either solution...

>       * malicious editing, harder to have QA for it

You can use access control on the wiki too if desired.

>       * work to get the DocBook -> Moin transition right

I've put the best existing code for this into the docteam repository,
it will need a bit of work and some scripting to add some features and
work around unsupported features but it can be done. An example of
what it produces in its pure form is at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MatthewEast/PackagingGuide.

This is work that would substantially help the docteam generally, in
order to host other documents in the help wiki.

If the worst comes to the worst we can simply generate html from the
docbook and add it to the wiki as html (moin has an simple html
parser). But I don't think that will be necessary.

>       * what happens to the packaging-guide package?

I'd say that it can disappear for the time being. Since internet
access is pretty much essential to contributing as an Ubuntu
developer, it's ok to have this documentation online only. If there is
an easy way to package it and people think this is useful, I'm sure it
wouldn't be that difficult to find a solution. Again there are some
half finished moin tools to generate offline versions of pages and any
work to improve them would greatly benefit the documentation team
generally.

>       * licensing

This is readily workaroundable by adding some licence text to the
bottom of each wiki page.

I think it's a very good idea to get this into the wiki.

Matt