Converting to Mallard?

[Phil Bull]

Hi Kyle,

On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 09:54 -0400, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
[...]
> As noted in that email, that topic is particularly well suited to being 
> treated as a customizable component. That is, different Ubuntu variants 
> do have different application sets (one might use Evolution, another 
> Thunderbird. One might use Network Manager, another Connection Manager, 
> etc). In addition, it is a perfect place to offer customized welcome 
> messages. It can easily be launched in Yelp on first boot and still be 
> seamlessly integrated into the Ubuntu Help Center, exactly as it is 
> today. The approach would be to package it separately. That way, this 
> one topic can be forked without having to fork *all* of Ubuntu Docs. (I 
> have pointed out that Ubuntu Docs is "monolithic" here before.) Should 
> this approach be taken, there are open questions about packaging 
> translations that need to be evaluated. Still, I propose that as a 
> *general goal*, docs should be more modular in their packaging to enable 
> remixing content into variants. We simply need to start to treat ubuntu 
> docs not as an end it itself for Ubuntu, but as an *upstream* to Ubuntu 
> variants.

I agree that ubuntu-docs should, to some extent, be considered an
upstream to other variants. However, rather than worrying about things
at the package level, couldn't we just change the layout of our bzr
branches to make it easier for variants to pick and choose the material
they want? When it's time to build a package for a variant, you just
pull in the unmodified "upstream" stuff you want from ubuntu-docs plus
the variant's own branched versions of topics at build time.

We can use page/section IDs in Mallard as an "API" so that given topics
always have the same ID, no matter who wrote them. If we keep it
relatively stable, variants can replace some parts of the API themselves
while maintaining appropriate linking and structure. They can add to the
structure easily, just by dropping new Mallard topics in. There's a new
"stub" page feature in Mallard which can help with this too.

The issue would be when a topic needs to be removed, rather than added
or replaced. I seem to remember something about "control" files that
could handle this, although I'd worry about dangling links.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull