What are we doing wrong?

[Matthew East]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 10:36 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote:
>>       * The landing page looks ugly. I can see why someone would
>>         automatically assume the worst and seek out other documentation.
>>         The Mallard project is making great leaps to improve the look
>>         and (more importantly) the feel of documentation around the
>>         desktop, so there is hope if that move happens quickly (and
>>         properly). Some issues:
> [...]
>
> I agree. Mallard would make it pretty trivial to fix all this stuff. We
> wouldn't have a special index page which we need to keep updated, it
> would look better, the guide page links have descriptions which help
> people to navigate, and structuring the whole thing is insanely easy.
> Take a look at this:
>
> http://sites.google.com/site/philbull02/indexmockup.tar.gz
>
> I'm confident that we could port over to Mallard this release, if the
> translation infrastructure can handle it. What do people think?

The mockup looks great and would definitely be an awesome improvement.
I'm every so slightly nervous about trying something which upstream
hasn't yet tried. I like the idea of pushing ourselves but wonder
whether Lucid isn't quite the right release to shake things up in this
way. It's an LTS release and there would be bound to be quite a lot of
packaging and translation challenges to overcome by rehauling our
infrastructure in this way. It might be more suited to Lucid+1. After
all, we're already half way through the release cycle.

I don't want to be negative and if we want to give this a shot I will
definitely get involved and help as much as I can, but I just want to
make sure we get the timing right.

>> Oh, Yelp is also insanely slow and a source of many support questions
>> itself when it starts eating every resource it can find and spitting out
>> nothing in return. A big distro needs to commit serious technical
>> resources to this. There is work going on to port Yelp to use Webkit
>> (which will help), but the search system also needs a lot of work. As it
>> is, following the only immediate advice in the landing page  (“To find
>> help, insert a keyword in the search bar” - ‘never mind the nicely done
>> topics on the left, subject yourselves to the ugly search system’)
>> caused Yelp to hang indefinitely and chew up my processor until I
>> manually killed it from the terminal. (xkill missed a spot).
>
> I seem to remember someone saying that the Info page backend in Yelp
> causes a lot of the performance problems. It can be turned-off with a
> compile-time switch. Is anyone interested in investigating this?

I agree that the speed of yelp is a real pain. I tried this a couple
of releases back but the compile-time switch didn't seem to work. If
anyone with a bit of Gnome package building knowledge is interested in
giving this a go, it would be much appreciated.

Just to address the topic though, while most of the points which have
been raised are quite valid criticisms of our current desktop help,
and we should definitely try and address them, I don't think they
explain the mystery that Phil raised at the start, simply because our
desktop help documents are also available at http://help.ubuntu.com. I
personally do think that promotion and publicity is a big point: the
enthusiasm and publicity that the ubuntu-manual project has generated
for something that essentially reproduces what we're already doing
shows us that this publicity has been lacking from our project
generally.

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