Gnome documentation used in Ubuntu distributions

[Matthew East]

Hi,

* Don Scorgie:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 23:33 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> <snip to the relevant part>
>> =1=
>>
>> We could modify the package which the relevant file is in:
>> gnome-user-guide. This is not something that the docteam has ever tried
>> before. You can get started by doing "apt-get source gnome-user-guide"
>> (which gets you the gnome-user-docs source package) and then you'll need
>> to create an Ubuntu-specific patch which is applied to the text.
>>
>> I don't know how difficult this will be, because I've never investigated
>> whether it is possible to maintain patches on text in packages. We
>> should ask one of the Ubuntu developers, or specifically the Ubuntu
>> Gnome maintainers, for some guidance, I think.
>>
>> =2=
>>
>> Instead of directly linking to the Gnome documents as we currently do,
>> we could copy them, import them into *our* repository/package, and make
>> amendments there. This would require a fair amount of care about keeping
>> them up to date, and importing translations, but might be possible.
>>
>> I'd be interested to hear what people think about the best way to
>> approach this.
> 
> You may also want to talk to the legal people about this as there might
> be licensing issues about either of these routes.  I don't really know
> if there is, but the difficulty of distro enhancements has been
> discussed upstream before [1].  I don't know what the requirements /
> obligations are, but it's worth reading the fine print.

We don't have any legal people :)

But I don't think there are any difficulties with either of the
approaches described above, in both cases the idea is that the
user-guide would remain a single document with its existing license and
contributor attribution.

Problems arose in the past when we tried to copy bits of the user-guide
into our own documents, that's not this case, I don't think.

> [1] one of the reasons we're looking for a new license for Project Mallard

Personally I don't think it's needed - if every page is a separate
document, which is my understanding of the idea, then it's very flexible
for people to have documents with different licenses, if necessary. But
my knowledge of that project is very peripheral.

Matt
-- 
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 252 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20070615/e70cf90c/attachment.pgp>