[Ubuntu-manual] An interesting blog by Matt Zimmerman touches on docs

[Kyle Nitzsche]

Hi Jason,
On 07/09/2010 04:08 PM, Jason Cook wrote:
> The inclusion of on-disk documentation should be up to the user and be 
> "package-wide". Having a "documentation" package that has the 
> documentation for all installed applications. The way this would work 
> (at least in theory) is:
>
>     * on instalation of this package
>           o finds all installed packages
>           o check for documentation
>           o download documentation
>     * on installation of new package(s)
>           o find newly installed packages
>           o download new documentation
>     * on removal of package
>           o remove install documentation
>
> Being done this way allows the user to choose weather documentation is 
> installed by default and conserves disk space by only having the 
> documentation for installed application.This would also eliminate the 
> need to install a separate package (such as openshot-docs) for 
> documentation, it would be added automatically.
>
That's a reasonable amount of infrastructure development in order to 
support downloadable, translated docs with the primary goal of 
supporting the use case of a user who is not connected to the internet. 
Yet, it assumes they do have an internet connection at other times (in 
order to download the docs). While it is possible, I tend to think a 
more strategic direction is increasingly more web based help with 
increasingly less on-disk help.

Cheers,
Kyle
> Jason Cook