usb-creator Draft

[Phil Bull]

Hi Matt,

On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 18:47 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> 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;

This is an easy fix. We can just send merge proposals from an
ubuntu-core-doc branch. I'm sure the branch maintainers will be happy
that someone else is dealing with the docs and will merge the branches
in a timely manner.

> (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.

The same as above... can't we just push the translations to the main
branch from our own branch? Or, maybe we can convince someone to add
proper XML translation support to Rosetta? That would be a major win for
the open-source documentation community, I think.

If we move to Mallard in the near future, translation should become a
bit easier too (although Milo's the guy to ask about that).

> 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.

Yes, I'd always wondered about that. I think that we should take over
the maintenance of all of the Ubuntu-native documentation, but keep the
docs with their respective packages. This makes sense from a packaging
perspective (having a dep on ubuntu-docs is restrictive), and will also
allow code to be used by non-Ubuntu projects more easily (e.g. jockey).

I think that this would make it easier for people to work with the doc
team, too. I'm concerned that other teams don't currently come to us
when they need docs doing.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull