book content in dapper

[Matthew East]

Hi Thomas,

On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 12:05 +0200, email.listen at googlemail.com wrote:
> Am Mon, 8. May 2006 10:46 schrieb Matthew East:
[...]
> > The difficulty with including this content in the ordinary way (in Yelp)
> > is that it really comprehensively overlaps with material that already
> > exists. We're going to cause a lot of confusion if we include this
> > material in that way because:
> >
> >  (a) we have done a lot of work to try and promote the desktop and
> > server guides in the yelp table of contents and ensure that the user is
> > not confused by all the overlaps that already exist between our
> > documentation and the Gnome documentation.

> IMO, no point for not having the book content.
> The Book will be for those who like to have a printed version. Yelp is for 
> those who prefer online reading

This slightly misses the point: the proposal is to include both the
official book and the existing documentation in the distro, and thus "on
screen". As for printing, html is generally not great for printing. We
supply PDFs of our guides for printing purposes.

> >  (b) the existing documentation is translated, whereas this wouldn't be.
> This is the point, the book content _must_ be translated!
> 
> BTW, you are wrong the desktop guide is _not_ translated (at least not for 
> de_DE)

There's not a lot we can do about that: the German translation has not
progressed particularly well. However, other languages (8 of them) have
the guide fully translated [1] and hopefully more will have completed it
by the deadline. If you want to contribute to the German translation,
I'm sure that would be much appreciated.

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+source/ubuntu-docs/+pots/desktopguide

[...]

> > (By the way, and of course speaking merely personally, it is quite
> > discouraging to have put in loads of work on the Desktop Guide (not to
> > mention trying to ensure that our guides don't overlap, and that
> > everything is translated) over this release and then find that
> > untranslated material written outside the group with basically the same
> > scope is going to be included as well).

> I would judge this as a lack of coordination in documentation writing.
> May be it should be discussed how such redundant work may be avoided in the 
> future. It's ineffective and as you mentioned it may become dismotivating, 
> sometimes.

Well, not really: there are loads of really good reasons that one can
see for taking the decision to author an official book outside the
documentation team and I think the team accepted it.

The problem arises when 6 months of effort have been put into producing
good quality documentation for the distro which doesn't overlap and that
can be translated: purely from a user experience point of view the
inclusion of the book alongside the existing material will be a Bad
Thing, in my opinion. From the point of view of someone who worked on
getting all those things right (and is quite passionate about them), it
is discouraging, as I'm sure you'll understand.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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