Revamping the Packaging Guide

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everybody,

the first mail was a summary of the discussion so far. Below my own
thoughts.

On 13.12.2010 11:06, Daniel Holbach wrote:
> The general plan looks like this:
>  1. decide on a toolkit
>  2. review old documentation (reusability, etc. - [3] and [4] might be
>     helpful there)
>  3. update old docs and massage them into single standalone articles
>     that focus on explaining specific tasks (and re-use bits here and
>     there)
>  4. package for Ubuntu, publish guides on the web, etc. as more and
>     more guides get added

The current wiki pages are not easily translatable, the reusabilty
(achieved by loads of <Include()> statements) is very confusing,
comments on some of the pages indicate problems readers had that are not
really triaged in any way. I think the steps above should get us a
maintainable, good packaging guide.

Task-based articles are also a better way of explaining things than
having one huge guide that intimidates new contributors. The spec [1]
has a number of suggested articles we'd like to write. Some of them are
in [2] already.

I personally am quite fond of ReStructured Text by now. If you have a
look at [2] and check out the html output at [3] you can see how little
it takes to write nice documentation.


I set up an initial ~ubuntu-packaging-guide-team (including
~ubuntu-core-doc and ~ubuntu-dev) but would like to make use of merge
proposals in the future, so we catch typos and small mistakes easily.

Any additional thoughts? Anyone interested in contributing a guide?

Have a great day,
 Daniel


[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/ImprovePackagingGuide
[2] https://code.launchpad.net/~dholbach/+junk/ubuntu-packaging-guide
[3] http://daniel.holba.ch/temp/guide/