usb-creator Draft

[Matthew East]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Jonathan Jesse<jjesse at gmail.com> wrote:
> Likewise I believe Ubuntu Doc people should
> be contributing to their various upstream documentation and linking to that
> as well.

Where there is an active upstream documentation project, you're quite
right, and several contributors to ubuntu-docs (most notable Phil and
Milo) are also contributing actively with Gnome upstream. Equally,
where material is suitable for use upstream, we don't hesitate to pass
that on. However, usb-creator is a native Ubuntu project: it doesn't
have an upstream to speak of and as a result I believe that the result
of including this documentation in the usb-creator source package
rather than directly in ubuntu-docs would be:

(a) it wouldn't be updated properly as there is no "upstream
documentation team" and the ubuntu-docs team doesn't have direct
access to the relevant bzr branch;
(b) it wouldn't be translated at all because translating xml is
difficult, requires manual work and setting up a special toolchain
which ubuntu-docs already has in place.

This is very ably demonstrated by the documentation for
gnome-app-install, another native Ubuntu application, which was
written by Jerome in 2006. It hasn't been updated since 2006 and is
only translated into one language (Swedish). Compare that with the
actively maintained ubuntu-docs branch which is translated into tens
and tens of languages.

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