Ubuntu Manual concerns

[Shaun McCance]

On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 15:44 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> The second is: Did you really have to fork so much of the existing
> documentation? Perfectly good documentation exists for almost everything
> in the manual: We have lots of stuff on Software Management, Security,
> the Desktop, working with common apps etc., plus a Command Line guide,
> within the currently shipping Ubuntu System Documentation (System ->
> Help and Support). It's all available online too, and we've been able to
> produce a single-document PDF from it before, albeit not a very
> attractive one.

In a linear book, you usually don't want to put main content behind
links to other resources. It works really nicely for help, but not
so well for books.

There is the question of how much of that content is actually useful
to the target reader in something with "Getting Started" in the title.
Encrypting files and folders doesn't strike me as a "Getting Started"
topic, for example.

When there is genuinely useful content that could be shared between
this manual and the system docs, I wonder if this could have been
handled better by using a format that is designed to handle content
reuse with build-time conditional processing. This is going to sound
strange coming from me, but here it is: DITA.

There are lots of technical solutions for content reuse. I think in
this case, though, the problem isn't technical. It's social.

--
Shaun