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[Matthew East]

Hi Nick,

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Nick Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com> wrote:
> Matthew East wrote:
>> In this case, there isn't any doubt that the utility is a useful one:
>> it's a great idea as those who responded to your initial request for
>> comments agreed. But there is one important question: why does this
>> project warrant a separate website, as opposed to going directly into
>> help.ubuntu.com?
>
> I might be wrong, but I think that the tool Dustin built does generate
> the man pages automatically on a regular basis and it could be a bit
> dangerous to have it running on an already heavily loaded web site (as I
> suppose help.ubuntu.com is).

Do you know how regularly? Obviously they would need to be regenerated
for each release, but otherwise I would be surprised if it's necessary
to regenerate them more than once a month or every two months: man
pages don't really change that much between releases. But anyhow, I
don't think that is a blocker, I'm fairly sure there would be a
technical solution (like generating the html elsewhere and copying it
over).

>  I also think that the prefixing with
> "manpages" allow to make a clear distinction between upstream provided
> manuals and official (and specific) documentation the team has created
> for Ubuntu.

I don't really see that - these are Ubuntu manpages, in the sense that
they come from Ubuntu and where an Ubuntu program is different from
upstream, the manpage is updated accordingly. They are pretty clearly
documentation, and as such belong on help.u.c.

While they might be a different type of documentation, that is only a
justification for making some kind of distinction in the UI, like
including a tag somewhere on the page, not creating a separate
website. Not everyone looks at the address bar, as we've discovered
with other Ubuntu sites. Even for those that do, a url like
help.ubuntu.com/manpages is equally descriptive.

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