#ubuntu-doc report for 2004-12-29

Thu Dec 30 12:52:23 UTC 2004

#ubuntu-doc report for 2004-12-29

Editorial note:
  The entire #ubuntu-doc report staff wants to thank you yesterday's IRC
  participants for the large round of positive feedback!  Thank you!!

* GUI tool for solving conflicts: meld

Enrico suggested interested people to have a look at meld
(http://meld.sourceforge.net/) as a GUI nice tool to solve conflicts and
merge files:
 <enrico> apt-get install meld
 <enrico> meld filea.txt fileb.txt
 <enrico> it's really cute.

* Auto-setting XML_CATALOG_FILES variable when building documentation

It seems that various distributions have different locations for the
catalog file.  Enrico and Froud came up with a makefile snippet that can
check a list of various known candidate locations and select the first
one that exists.  However, in Debian sid it works even without setting
XML_CATALOG_FILES: if that distributions have a way of properly
configuring the lookup path for the catalogs, we should comply to that
or we risk breaking more than we solve.

* Documentation taking ages to build

The documentation currently takes ages to build, because xsltproc loads
the DocBook DTD from the Oasis website every time to get all the
entities.  Froud says that we can include the dtd and xsl in the
repository to speed things up.  An alternative way is to switch
validation off with "xsltproc --novalid", but validation is useful.

* mutt tips

In a side-chat about mutt, Enrico gave a few useful tips about the limit
('l') function:

 <enrico> 'l' is 'limit'.  It allows you to filter messages.  For
	  example, l enrico  shows you only messages having to do with
	  me
 <enrico> Then you can use modifiers: "l ~f enrico" shows messages FROM
          me; "l ~b Sivan" shows messages that talk about you, and so on
 <enrico> ~h header, ~t "to".  Then you do "l ~=" to see duplicated
          messages and "l ~F" to see messages you flagged important
 <enrico> Important: "l ." to remove the filter

* Ubuntu on X-Box

abelli leaked some restricted information about the existance of this
top-secret project.  If you own an X-Box and feel like it should have a
proper operating system, keep an eye on what he's doing...

* Documentation default license

Scared by the title? :)

No, nothing changed: we're always with dual CCbySA-and-GFDL as in
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2004-December/000759.html
Froud added a long-time-needed LICENSE file in the repository.

* Use Bugzilla!

Froud was seeing tasks mentioned which are not present in Bugzilla,
and urged people not to have private TODO-list but share them in
Bugzilla, so that other people can see what's planned and things can be
reassigned.

Enrico, who generally hates Bugzilla and was waiting for Malone,
realised that it makes a lot of sense, dumped his TODO-list into
Bugzilla and felt his Team Work Karma going up and bright.
Now his personal TODO list is also decorated with nice numbers.

Since using Bugzilla is non-trivial, Enrico volunteered to act as a
human interface for people who don't feel like wrapping their brains
around it.  If you would like to enter a new task, reassign it, take
care of it and so on, but you have problems doing it, mail Enrico or ask
in IRC and he or someone else will do it for you.

* Can people write things into the repository?

ChrisH asked what's the status of repository restructuring, to see if he
can contribute without getting too many conflicts.  Turns out that the
restructuring has finished.

We realised that:
 - svn is in place
 - accounts are there
 - book layout has been defined
 - the repository has been cleaned up recently and cleanup has finished
 - the DocBook toolchain has been defined and the makefile works
 - there is a list, a wiki, a bugzilla, an IRC channel

So, we have the perfect infrastructure in place for writing
documentation and we are the luckiest documentation team in the world!

Let's ROCK!  The only thing we're missing is the documentation itself,
which is GOOD, because our mission is exactly to WRITE IT!

* How to make proposals in the list

Froud was frustrated because he's sometimes made proposals or asked for
opinions in the list, but people didn't answer.

Enrico says he saves lots of frustration by setting a reasonable
deadline on proposals: if noone answers, wait for the the deadline then
do it.

A suggested reasonable minimum deadline would be something that would
allow people in various timezones to get the message in the morning and
answer to it in the evening.  Longer deadlines would be useful for
things involving many people or complicated matters.

There's also to be said that various people are kind of in christmas
vacations at the moment.

* What is a DocBook catalog?

Froud pointed at http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Catalogs.html

* Fixing the Installation Guide

Froud noticed that the Installation Guide contains mentions to "Debian
4.10", which should be fixed.
Since the Installation Guide sources are part of Debian Installer and
the Ubuntu patches are maintained by Colin Watson in the Ubuntu branch
of Debian installer, changes to the Installation Guide should be sent to
Colin Watson or even to fjp upstream.

Kamion suggests to talk to fjp to see if we can cooperate on branding
infrastructure: that would be very useful.

Kamion also asks for a doc component in bugzilla for the installation
manual, so he can get those bugs.

* Deadlines

sivang has been wondering what deadlines we have to allow translators to
do their job and to be in time to ship documentation with Hoary.
The discussion went on for quite a while touching many things, and I
can't see a precise answer.  During the chat, sivang proposed to start a
thread on this in the mailing list, which would indeed be needed, so
we'll probably hear more of this later.

Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
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