Questions about h.u.c. branch

[Matthew East]

Hi Connor,

On 4 December 2010 00:07, Connor Imes <rocket2dmn at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi team,
>
> I have some questions regarding our help.ubuntu.com branch [1].  I've
> recently seen some commits that caught me off guard, so I figured now
> was a good time to ask to clear up my confusion.
>
> I was under the impression that we (Matthew usually) simply copied the
> html exports here whenever we did an official docs release.  After
> stable releases, new ones are added, unsupported versions are removed,
> and the main index is updated appropriately.  Am I correct in assuming
> that this is the normal approach?

Yes, that's correct. I haven't checked some of the recent commits to
this branch - are they of any concern?

> When commits are made to the h.u.c branch, does something else have to
> happen before the changes go live, or is it automatic?
> If automatic, what is the delay (if any)? Is there a regular export from
> there every 24 hours?

The process is automatic and takes place every 24 hours. I'm not sure
what time of day. Occasionally the automatic pull from the bzr branch
breaks, in which case this needs to be reported here and to the
Canonical Sysadmins.

See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/BuildingDocumentation

> If the process is automatic, I wouldn't mind updating the h.u.c. branch
> more regularly from our stable-release branches - does anybody see any
> issues there?

I don't, as long as we are clear that any update to the h.u.c branch
should reflect a change which has already been made to the relevant
stable branch in accordance with our usual practice. I'd be concerned
if there was a divergence between the documentation. There will be an
issue that the h.u.c documentation will be slightly ahead of the
documentation in a particular release, because in order to release
updates to an existing release, it's necessary to upload the material
to Launchpad for translation, allow time for translation, import
translations and upload them to Ubuntu as a stable release update.

We really need to document our practice in relation to existing stable
releases a lot better. I have probably promised this a few times in
the past but will try to put together a proposal document for
discussion (unless one already exists somewhere...).

> Finally, is there any reason to commit individual fixes here that are
> normally fixed by editing the docbook source except in critical cases?
> It seems like duplicate work to me, though mostly harmless.

Probably not - again we should ensure that the docbook source doesn't
get out of date with the html. The docbook source should always be the
primary place to fix any bug, except where the bug *only* appears in
the website for whatever reason (e.g. a broken link arising out of a
problem with our html build system). Ideally, we would keep
help.ubuntu.com up to date with the package in the relevant release of
Ubuntu. But we need to get together a good system for doing that. The
serverguide would be an exception to this, as it is only published
online.

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