Ubuntu Documentation - Getting Started

[Kevin Godby]

Hello, Doug.

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:18 PM, Doug Smythies <dsmythies at telus.net> wrote:
> ??? I do not understand. Did I do something wrong?
> I'm saying that the edits I did, have already eliminated any unneeded
> packages. I also deleted the entire GPG stuff. So, I'm saying it is already
> contributor specific, and even desktop specific because there is already
> a good serverguide specific "getting started" page (which needs the
> docbook packages).

I apologize, my email wasn't very clear.

I agree with your proposal to remove the GPG stuff.

In addition, I propose that we remove the 'Configure your shell' and
'Updating the changelog' sections as that's more of a packaging issue
than a contributor issue. This means the contributor won't need all of
the packages we have them installing at the top of the page.

Other than that, I think it's to the point where we can bring in a
couple new contributors and have them walk through the getting started
process and see how things go.

> The packaging page, where Benjamin got a bunch of the content, and where
> Hannie pointed to that time, can stay as the packaging reference.
>
> However, and due to not needing GPG, I now agree with including the
> remaining content, rather than linking to the packaging page.
>
> There are still some other things to agree on, from my e-mail
> of the other day (which is why we are currently maintaining two copies
> of the page at the moment).

Here are my thoughts on the getting started page:

The getting started page is aimed at new documentation contributors.
Many of these contributors may be interested in helping Ubuntu and
think that documentation is something they can start with as they're
not developers.  So the getting started page needs to provide them
with the minimal steps required for them to start contributing to the
project. We don't want them to have to jump through any extraneous
hoops (e.g., installing things only used for packaging, setting up
unnecessary GPG keys).  We should aim to make contributing to the
documentation as simple and painless as possible.

On a separate page (or pages if necessary), we should document the
complete procedure for packaging the documentation. These instructions
should also be comprehensive and easy to follow. This page can contain
the steps for maintaining the changelog, creating the GPG keys and
using them to sign the packages, etc.  This page should cover the
entire release process including packaging and pushing to the web.

What do you guys think about this?

—Kevin