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[Matthew East]

Hi Phil,

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:
> While we're at it, is the "Adding, Removing and Updating Applications"
> section necessary any more? The Software Centre has reasonably good docs
> which we could extend to cover some other questions that users have. We
> can just link to that document from the Help Centre front page.

I agree in principle with having just one document which covers these
matters and I think that there will certainly be useful material in
the add-applications document which could be incorporated into the
software-center manual. However it might well cover slightly
extraneous topics such as how Ubuntu software works, how to install a
*deb file, and so on.

This raises questions about how we handle documents which are included
in other packages than ubuntu-docs. First, when a question arises
about what the scope of a particular document would be, are the
developers of that package happy to defer to the ubuntu-doc team? Will
they promptly and happily merge branches/patches from us?

Second, how can we efficiently handle the fact that other important
documents are in different sources to the core bzr branch that we
focus on. What I'd like to see is a plan about how we as a team can
efficiently keep track of the different documents that we are
interested in, and can draw them together when we publish material to
help.ubuntu.com. Taking software-center as an example, there is a
clear need to publish this manual on help.ubuntu.com or elsewhere
online [1], but it is quite cumbersome to have to bring together many
different packages and publish them on help.ubuntu.com without a
wholesale change to our publishing processes. Having said that,
library.gnome.org manages this issue quite well, so I'm sure we can
learn from them and improve our processes.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-docs/+bug/476411

I've copied mpt for his thoughts from the software-center perspective.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF