Using Mallard for Ubuntu docs

[Phillip Whiteside]

Hi,
as one who does not use gnome, my little two cents worth is that
instructions should not be tied 100% to gnome. Whilst the vast majority use
'vanilla' ubuntu, there are other flavours. As ubuntu is ubuntu, should we
be as aware of that as we are translations?
Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc. Each of the flavours has translation teams and I'm
sure some translators work on more than one flavour, the 'base' installation
documents need to cover all that is common (grub, kernel etc) after that how
does for example, the chromium browser team from ubuntu work with those from
kde work with xfce, work with lxde etc ? I've seen some excellent wiki pages
that put in the difference between gksudo and kdesu. One easy example for
lubuntu (allbeit not a fully fledged ubuntu yet) is that it would be leafpad
and not gedit that is the shipped programme for people to do that lower
level of editing with.

Regards,

Phill.


On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Kyle Nitzsche
<kyle.nitzsche at canonical.com>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Just chiming in with my two cents for your consideration...
>
> Wondering how this plan coordinates with the (lofty) goal that was
> discussed with great enthusiasm at Maverick UDS of creating a common
> pool for documentation source, where the Ubuntu Manual project and the
> Ubuntu Docs project can house doc source material, thereby supporting
> common usage and enabling all the good bits that derive from that, such
> as single-source maintenance, reusability, higher quality (since errors
> need to be corrected only once), but most importantly, improving the
> user experience through support of remixed content into exciting new
> contexts. Since there is currently no docbook -> mallard converter (be
> it through xslt or whatever), then that goal is made more problematic
> and distant, it would seem. Since this was a topic of high interest at
> UDS, this deserves some explicit consideration here, it would seem.
>
> There were discussions previously on this list about the impacts
> (regressions) that conversion from docbook to mallard would have on
> existing Ubuntu Docs translations, namely that inline tags are often
> different (between docbook and mallard), which means the source strings
> are different, which means existing translations break. So that is a
> potential regression that probably should be identified up front with
> some kind of fact-based analysis (5% of strings, or 50%?) that gives
> some idea of the extent of translation regression that may occur, at
> least to enable Ubuntu Translators to understand what kind of additional
> work to expect. If much of this can be avoided by writing a clever
> conversion script, then that should be identified as an important piece
> of work, it would seem.
>
> Also, see below...
>
> On 06/30/2010 11:10 AM, Phil Bull wrote:
> > Hi Jim,
> >
> > On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 09:51 -0500, Jim Campbell wrote:
> >
> >> So did we want to go ahead with using Mallard for this release of
> >> Ubuntu docs?  Phil, if I recall correctly, didn't you have a branch of
> >> Ubuntu docs containing page stubs from our prior release?
> >>
> > I think we should go ahead with the Mallard conversion. I looked around
> > for a branch containing stubs, but I didn't find one. Who knows what I
> > did with it?
> >
> > Ideally, we would coordinate with the GNOME doc team; we should slot our
> > docs into their Desktop Help. That's in a very early stage of
> > development at the moment, though. For now, we should probably just
> > identify clearly Ubuntu-specific areas of our own docs and convert
> > those.
> >
> >
> The Ubuntu desktop experience is sometimes different from a pure Gnome
> one, at least until Ubuntu innovations like notifications, window
> buttons, and panel items like networking, about me, and power management
> are adopted in gnome (I think I got that list right...). So this idea of
> "slotting in" of ubuntu docs into gnome docs may result in two
> explanations in such areas: if on Gnome, it's like this, if on Ubuntu,
> like this, which seems less than ideal. I continue to wonder whether it
> makes more sense to have an Ubuntu Docs framework that "slots in" gnome
> docs as appropriate, which, I realize, is how it is currently done.
> There is no technical barrier to including mallard content in docbook
> source that I know of.
>
> > It would be helpful to convert all of the existing DocBook into plain
> > text first. I find that much easier to deal with when doing a
> > conversion. I'll set-up a branch with Mallard .page stubs and dump the
> > text-only topics into the .page files. That should provide a good
> > starting point.
> >
> > To help the process along, would anyone be interested in a Mallard
> > training session on IRC?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Phil
> >
> >
> Cheers,
> Kyle
>
> --
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>
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