future of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide

[Stefan Potyra]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag 13 September 2007 09:38:06 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:
> "Jordan Mantha" <mantha at ubuntu.com> writes:
> > On 9/12/07, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> >> Have you considered moving the Ubuntu Packaging Guide to a debian
> >> package? They are using a docbook variant called 'DebianDoc', which
> >> seems to work for them. Would that work perhaps for us as well, given
> >> that the Packaging guide is already in docbook format?
> >
> > [...] that's what we've been doing basically. We have the packaging
> > guide in docbook and produce a packaging-guide .deb from it. The
> > problem is that that hasn't really worked very well, IMO.
>
> Oh, I'm sorry. Until now, I wasn't aware of the 'packaging-guide'
> package in the archive. I think we should advertise that more,
> especially to our mentors and motu-applicants!
>
> Having said this, I'd have 3 ideas:
>
>   1. move the packaging guide to a bzr branch hosted in launchpad in the
>      ubuntu-dev team.
>
>   2. Ask every new MOTU-applicant to contribute (at least) a small patch
>      to the text.
>
>   3. Leave the text in docbook. Generate the html, pdf, etc version of
>      it daily and publish it to some webserver. (I think this is alredy
>      done. At least chapter 1 of the packaging-guide indicates the HTML
>      and PDF were at http://help.ubuntu.com. However, I couldn't find it
>      within 2 minutes of searching. A direct link would be helpful here.)

Actually I think this is a good idea, which could be worth a try.

Nonetheless, as written in the thread already, the wiki has the big advantage 
to have a lower entry barrier. OTOH the wiki is (and probably always will be) 
a kind of dumping place. As an example, I wanted to remove [1] once, which I 
started, but never finished (and hopefully people didn't read, because it's 
not very good). As you can see, (and also from the statement in the page) 
it's still there, and very inaccurate/even wrong in some places.

Hence I'm atm. imagining what possible contributors the packaging guide has. 
Imho it's mainly MOTUs and Hopefuls, both who should be capable of or for 
whom it makes sense to learn how to deal with docbook and bzr. Did I forget 
someone?

Hence I'm a little bit in favor of trying out Reinhard's plan, though I must 
admit that it has the downside that editing then has a higher entry barrier 
(but can be done more effective if you know the tools, again IMHO).

Cheers,
    Stefan.
--
[1]: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Packages/CommonPackagingMistakes/DebianCopyright
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/attachments/20070914/7434bc96/attachment-0001.pgp