Ubuntu desktop documentation scope and location

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2022-05-16 17:28, Daniele Procida wrote:
> On 13 May 2022, at 21:53, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com>
> wrote:
>> While I understand that there is no decision yet, I don't
>> understand why you feel prevented from using Discourse in the
>> meantime. I mean, discourse.u.c is there since long, and it's
>> frequently used, also for various kinds of targeted documentation.
>> (I know since I receive email copies for every single entry.) And I
>> assume that Discourse is a more convenient tool for publishing
>> English only documentation than manually written HTML is.
> 
> The problem is that Ubuntu documentation already suffers from a
> violation of the principle that entities should not be multiplied
> beyond necessity.
> 
> You’ll find Ubuntu documentation relating to certain topics scattered
> across a quite unreasonable number of platforms and properties. It’s
> part of a vicious circle: it’s not clear where some documentation
> should be updated, so someone creates a new place, and now there’s
> yet another place competing for maintenance attention, and bound to
> decay.
> 
> No documentation should ever be maintained in more than one place.
> Any plan to create a new place will have to include a plan for
> consolidation and unification - including removal of existing
> material from other places - in order to be viable.
> 
> In the meantime, the best place is the place that exists already,
> while we gather strength and resources to tackle the problem in a
> co-ordinated and systematic way.

Thanks for sharing the rationale, Daniele. I agree on your problem 
description as well as the goal.

But with that said, it's a bit unfortunate IMO to conclude that 
help.ubuntu.com is the only viable location in the meantime. 
help.ubuntu.com requires complete static HTML pages, which is a 
cumbersome way to handle documentation compared to e.g. discourse.

Please note that existing docs at h.u.c (except for the Community Help 
Wiki) consists of content that was preprocessed with appropriate tools. 
Nobody is maintaining the individual HTML pages manually.

Also discourse.u.c is a "place that exists already". ;)

-- 
Rgds,

Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj