Converting to Mallard?

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 21:32 -0400, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
> On 04/14/2010 09:24 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > I'm not going to address what's best for Ubuntu, its users,
> > or its contributors. But I do want to point out that Phil
> > is the primary person driving the new Mallard-based Gnome
> > help right now. It's not a matter of taking some black box
> > from some nebulous "other" provider. Distro people can, do,
> > and absolutely should shape upstream software.
> >    
> I support Phil, you and the community. The amount of work you all do is 
> truly exceptional.
> 
> I just want to see a more complete analysis of the options.

That's perfectly fair. What are the other options, though?
Obviously continuing to develop in DocBook is one. And it's
a safe, well-trodden path. But,

>  If the 
> approach doesn't allow for customization, then that's an issue for me.

Mallard might not be completely customizable without patching,
but it's far more so than DocBook or anything else I see people
using today.

I just sent an outline to the Mallard mailing list about how we
could support full downstream modifications without patching:

http://projectmallard.org/pipermail/mallard-list_projectmallard.org/2010-April/000009.html

It's a very rough idea, and it needs some community feedback and
testing. I don't like implementing features that nobody's actively
trying to use.

> I still wonder about some previous issues I've raised respecting Mallard:
>   * what control over user submitted topics (might the user confuse them 
> with official docs and can the user revert to official docs?)

I messed around with a link signature system back in January or
February. It would allow you lock down certain guides, so that
only people with your private key could insert topic links into
them. It's solvable. I just don't want to blow a lot of my time
solving a problem I haven't seen happen yet.

>   * translation regressions and new work (all of which may be worth it)

Yeah, Gnome's translators are probably going to smack me around
at GUADEC. But our current user guide is crap, so Mallard or no,
we can't fix our documentation without translation regressions.

Ubuntu's user guide is in much better shape than Gnome's. But it
doesn't address all the same things, and it passes the buck to
Gnome for a lot of stuff. So if Ubuntu decides not to use Gnome
content at all, that's a heck of a lot of new work for you all.

>   * control of the order of topics

The ordering mechanism was already revised once in response to
suggestions from Phil and Milo. The current system works quite
well for all the cases I've encountered. Note that with dynamic
content, it's impossible to get perfectly controlled ordering.
I'd be interested to see cases where link groups break down.

--
Shaun