Converting to Mallard?

[Kyle Nitzsche]

On 04/15/2010 12:39 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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,
>    
I not referring so much to mallard vs docbook as I was to what's the 
content. see below.
>    
>>   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 am thinking more along the lines of modularizing docs into *packages* 
that could be forked and customized as needed without having to fork the 
whole shebang. See previous email in response to Jim Campbell's post.
>> 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.
>    
OK. Let's take a wait and see approach to this. Thanks for being responsive.
>    
>>    * 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.
>
>    
Re-use is king, content should be written once, and as far upstream as 
possible, with a customization strategy in place for downstreams. It 
could well be that much of Ubuntu Docs content an translations 
can/should be refactored to Mallard and pushed to Gnome.
>>    * 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.
>
>    
OK. Sounds workable. Again, thanks.
> --
> Shaun
>
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