Help page design, and the future of the Ubuntu Desktop Guide

[Matthew East]

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Hi!

* Matthew Paul Thomas:
> As promised during the meeting on Saturday (Friday, for many of you),
> I've written a wiki page on how I think we should write and arrange help
> pages for maximum usefulness.
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuHelp/PageStructure>

This is all good stuff, and we should certainly aim for this. However,
I'm not sure whether we can achieve a help system that is wholly
compatible with these ideas by Edgy.

We currently have a number of docbook books (Desktop Guide, Server
guide, etc). These don't really allow us very easily to keep short pages
as described in the above link without undertaking a comprehensive
rehash of the structure of the documentation.

At the beginning of the release cycle I thought that such a rehash would
be a good idea, but now, I feel that there is not sufficient time to do
it properly, and we need to look for a compromise.

This is especially so because upstream will soon be doing the rehash
themselves, providing us with a new working structure, and I think it
makes sense for us to do this at the same time.

For the next release, what I propose we do is this:

 * Generally speaking, work with the existing guides but bear in mind
Matthew's comments about how to write good help, and improve the guides
accordingly.
 * Eliminate any overlap between the guides, and identify ways to
present a coherent front page. So, for example, it might include:

Adding, Removing and Updating Software in Ubuntu [1]
Working with your Desktop [2]
Working with a Server [3]
Getting more help [4]
Contributing to Ubuntu [5]

[1] An article, based on what is currently in the desktop guide
[2] A book, what is now the desktop guide
[3] A book, what is now the server guide
[4] An article, based on what is currently in the desktop guide
[5] An article, potentially new, which includes a link to the packaging
guide.

Matt
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