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[Dustin Kirkland]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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).

We're shooting for nightly.  The incremental sync takes about 20-30
minutes.  The code has been highly optimized (using some neat hacks, I
might add) to minimize effort spent on unchanged debs.  I certainly
invite anyone to look at the source code in bzr and help improve it!

I've really appreciated the nightly runs during the development of
Intrepid, as I've been writing/modifying manpages, as well as reading
manpage documentation on other packages.

>>  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.

I tend to agree with Nick a bit here...  I would like to be careful
that this is not presented at "documentation written by the Ubuntu
community", which is what help.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com clearly
is.

Ubuntu already (unjustly) catches a lot of flack from Debian, Red Hat,
and others about receiving too much credit for work done by others.
I'd like to be sensitive about that, and avoid further criticism where
we can avoid it.

> 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.

Agreed!  That was actually the initial reason for starting this
thread...  I wanted to modify the "Ubuntu documentation" logo to help
clarify that this was in fact just HTML wrappers around manpage
documentation already found in the Ubuntu OS.


:-Dustin