Ubuntu Drupal

[Dougie Richardson]

2009/3/17 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
{snip}

> I don't agree. Our toolchain is not currenty cut out to produce
> documentation that can easily be put into a drupal database, and
> constructing such a toolchain would be a huge amount of work for very
> little benefit as far as I can see. I think using a CMS is a very
> large tool for a very small problem, if indeed there is a problem at
> all.

Our current toolchain utilises XML, its not a _huge_ leap to export
that to Drupal. I also don't think its that big a tool but it's
certainly scalable if the requirement is there for it - say we want to
give users the option to print PDF from out HUC site on the fly for
example or for users to build there own set of relevant pages.

There are other disadvantages to a set of statically produced pages,
searching for example - tags and categories allow more accurate
results based on the area you're interested in. For example if I
search for "package" that's mentioned in nearly every page but if I
qualify it with the "Install" category I only hit those pages. Now you
could argue that "install package" does the same but it doesn't - it
often refers to another page.

> For the last release cycle or so we have already been in a position to
> push bugfixes to the website, I do it fairly regularly for bugs that
> merit rebuilding the website. A list of recent changes to the website
> is in the revision history for the bzr branch that the website is
> synched from:

I understand Ubuntu Drupal can do that, automatically through the
Ubuntu Launchpad module as can control over who commits what where.

> Conceivably we could make it possible for more people to commit to
> that branch, but since I've always been the person building the
> documents and am familiar with the various scripts used, it's just me
> doing it at the moment.

Isn't that a good reason to consider a system that avoids scripts and
syncs with a launchpad BZR branch? Cron beats by hand any day (as long
as it works of course!).

> As for the suggestion that we could fix bugs on the website that
> aren't fixed in the packages we ship, I think that's a dangerous road
> to go down - once you do that you need to keep track carefully of what
> has been fixed in which place, and the documentation may start to
> diverge or be inconsistent. I think that if a bug is serious enough to
> warrant a fix being pushed to the website, it's serious enough to
> warrant the package being fixed as well.

I don't think that it necessitates divergence and that's not what I
meant. If the branches are linked to a CMS then changes to the web
site are just the latest revision of what is in the current trunk.

-- 
Regards,

Dougie Richardson
http://www.lynxworks.eu/
dougierichardson at ubuntu.com