Doc Template (Was: Doc-team members going to UDS?)

[Shaun McCance]

On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 12:46 -0400, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> > I don't believe in design by committee.  What we need is
> > people actually hammering on this stuff so we can find and
> > fix any shortcomings.  There are Ubuntu documentation people
> > who are actively working on Mallard, and I have to trust
> > that they're giving me an accurate picture of what Ubuntu
> > needs from us.
> >   
> Right, let me clarify: I mean customized versions of Ubuntu. I work in 
> the OEM group of Canonical and have faced the need to customized the 
> home help (I have hammered on it), and it has been difficult. It may or 
> may not be a matter of importance to the community, but it is 
> theoretically important to realize that Ubuntu itself is the upstream to 
> customized versions that benefit from the all the excellent work of the 
> community, for which I am personally thankful! These customized Ubuntu 
> distros may be widely used and deployed. There are some well-known 
> netbooks in this category. Regarding customizability, I am adding my two 
> cents to the conversation, namely: I hope we end up with help front page 
> help that is easily customizable in the ways I identified: easy to add 
> topics, easy to remove topics, easy to switch to a different front page 
> than the default.

OK.  So adding topics is the bread and butter of Mallard.
It's what it was designed to do.  Removing topics is not
something we've addressed specifically.  I think it would
be possible to effect this with anchor support, but I'm
not planning on adding that until Mallard 1.2.

Is it really difficult to just not install the files for
the topics you want to remove?  It seems an incredible
waste of disk space to have them there, especially on
netbooks and other mobile devices that frequently have
smaller SSD drives.

At any rate, even if it's not trivial, it's going to be
easier with Mallard than with DocBook or HTML, because
you have to worry less about other sections and pages
linking into what you've removed.

--
Shaun