One set of documentation needs to go

[Vikram Dhillon]

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
<lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Phill Whiteside <PhillW at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> It is precisely because several people new to docs knew or would understand
>> that call, that I issued the call to join ranks and just 'get on with it'.
>> I'd have no idea of how to help as I'm a wiki based person. Others would
>> like to help but there is still confusing instructions. Do we choose and
>> learn what ever docs uses or use what ever manual uses.... a.k.a..... get
>> your acts together and agree on one system :)
>>
>> Agree a standard!!!!!!

> It may seem frustrating to you, but different teams have very good
> reasons for their different tools in their communities. Xubuntu is
> using DocBook because it's a FOSS standard (Ubuntu docs used to be
> written in it), Ubuntu uses Mallard because of their upstream of Gnome
> and the Manual uses LaTeX to ease the on ramp for contributors and
> ability to export it to the formats they need. In each of these
> instances the tools used were selected specifically to suit the pool
> of contributors they had.
>
> Hope this helps.

Phill's reply took me by a surprise since he's an old member of our
docs-family, but as Elizabeth stated, we had to use different tools
due to different standards, however that really shouldn't matter too
much. There aren't that many hoops to jump when working with
documentation and if you feel like there are, that's why there is a
community to help you with it. If you feel like some documentation is
inadequate, open a launchpad bug with it, or just send a draft here
with just plain text, we'll transform it for you in the correct format
and all that so you don't have to worry it at all. Any good content is
usable and extremely helpful to us.

As a contributor, there are many ways we can work this out friends .
If you feel like the manual project is splitting the efforts and so
on, just submit the draft that you have to both mailing lists, and
then let them worry about how to organize and pull the content
together. Of course there are issues that we still need to iron out
and I am sure in the upcoming months we will hopefully work towards a
better solution.

-- 
Regards,
Vikram Dhillon