Software Center documentation

[Matthew East]

Hi David,

2010/3/4 David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com>:
> Currently Software Center ships its own documentation, and after a
> discussion in the Ubuntu Translations Coordinators team [1] we agreed
> that it would be best for documentation and translations to be included
> in ubuntu-docs.

I agree that from a translations and documentation team point of view,
this would be better, for the reasons which you have listed.

However, I proposed this last September and one of the objections was
that the help file is licensed under the GPL. If that can change, then
I think this would be a good idea. Here is a link to the discussion.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2009-September/013655.html

There is one other point which I would raise though: as I understand
it, Software Center is something of an upstream project, because it is
used in distributions like Debian. If that's the case, then there is a
clear argument for having help as part of the application which can be
used by Debian.

Obviously the absence of translations for this help file is extremely
unfortunate. And if the decision is taken to keep it in the upstream
product, I would say that some serious effort should be put into
making it translatable in the same way as the application's interface
is.

As to Kyle's point, I think the above point is a more fundamental one
to overcome if we're going to move forward with the proposal, so we
probably don't need to go into it (and we've probably gone into it so
many times on this list that it's stopped getting interesting). I do
think, and have repeatedly said in the past, that for Ubuntu
derivatives, there is a way around the problem which Kyle describes,
which is to ship ubuntu-docs. If the derivative wants to ensure that
its help takes into account the differences from Ubuntu, then it will
need to modify ubuntu-docs accordingly. The amount of work which that
will involve will depend on how different the derivative is from
Ubuntu. But it's work which it will need to do anyway if it is serious
about providing help. The derivative is shipping a customised Ubuntu,
so out of logical necessity, it will have to customise the help as
well, if it wants its help to be accurate.

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