Post Hoary

[Sean Wheller]

On Friday 04 March 2005 12:06, Corey Burger wrote:
> I content that we should to the wiki as the primary source for all
> documents.
>
> There are 2 primary reasons for it:
>
> 1. Low barrier to entry to new people
> 2. Fast changes
>
> Now, for this to happen, we need some pieces:
>
> 1. We need to choose a ship format. I say either PDF[1] or HTML
>
> 2. A good converter from HTML --> PDF
>
> 3. The wiki needs some major work on the backend
> -Remove parenting
> -Standardize on one markup (I propose the Wikipedia one, as it is
> fairly easy and becoming a standard)
> -Watchlists
> -Better history
>
> [1] - I say PDF as evince (http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/) is
> looking very cool. Also poppler is cool as well (pdf backend -
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2005-February/005951.html)
>
> Now rip me to shreds,

As I said if docbook is dropped from being the primary source for ubuntu 
documentation then I drop the project. 

However, if you mean to round trip from wiki in a manner that the docs are 
eventually stored in docbook then +1 I will help. I don't care how the docs 
are edited. I care that the docs are single source, can be validated, under 
rev management system such as baz, svn, cvs, that we can get short messages 
of what was updated by email and only for those bits that we have an interest 
in. I am not interested in the whole wiki.

My focus is the docs content in SVN and the document framework we have built 
since the beginning of the year. Ideas to make the editing easier are always 
welcome, but changing primary source is out of the question for me. As for 
the current functionality of wiki, I don't care about it. Presentation layer 
is something defined once and forgotten until you want a change.

A good converter HTML -> PDF does not exist. HTML is for presentation, XML is 
for semantics the two are very different applications. At Docbook we have had 
many discussions around this, tools have been developed, but non can round 
trip 100%.

This subject is long and I have already posted a long message today. There is 
more I could add, but let's leave it here.

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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