Status of doc.ubuntu.com

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Feb 15, 2008 7:04 PM, Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 06:33:35PM +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> > > Great.  At the same time, I think it should indicate what version it
> > > is on each page ("Draft Hardy Serverguide, dated x y z version 419 or
> > > whatever)
> >
> > I think that is overkill to be honest. The doc.u.c website always
> > shows the latest development version of everything.
>
> Most people who find it from the web won't know that.  This is the
> nature of the web.  People find it from other links, word-of-mouth,
> books marks, search engines, forum posts, etc.

Right, that's why we need to ensure that it's relatively clear that
the site is only for previewing documentation in development and not
for users. I think removing it from google will work to ensure the
risk of misunderstanding is pretty low.

> > > At any rate the top google hit is still
> > >
> > >  http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/index.html
> >
> > We certainly should do something about this, maybe even by excluding
> > doc.u.c from google at all... linking to it from the docteam wiki page
> > may well be good enough.
>
> The latest version is valuable since it often includes documentation
> that is applicable to previous versions, and the updates can be slow.
> Not indexing our latest versions would just drive folks to
> far-less-well vetted sources like various web forums.

That's not the right way to look at this, in my opinion - the solution
is to ensure that documentation for released versions is available
quickly and easily from help.ubuntu.com. doc.ubuntu.com is purely for
those interested in working with the documentation team (in fact, we
could easily change it to docteam.u.c now given that the svn repo at
the same address has been closed). I believe this was discussed
before.

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