future of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide

[Alexandre Vassalotti]

Sorry Jordan for the late reply. I been quite busy during the last few
weeks and I haven't been able to keep up with the recent discussions
about the guide.

I just would like to say that I am strongly in favor for moving the
guide to the wiki. Working solely with patches is a pain, always
require someone else to check them in (just remember my set of patches
that waited a month or two, without any feedback). Also, working
DocBook isn't most enjoyable thing either.

Sure, the wiki is subject to vandalism, but its advantages (i.e, ease
of editing, no commit accesses management, etc)  outweigh the risks.

The only problem, as you already mentioned, is making the guide a wiki
will make it difficult to distribute by means other than the Internet.
However, I don't think this is a big problem, since Debian/Ubuntu
packaging is inherently Internet-based.

Let me know when you will be ready for doing the DocBook->Moin
conversion, I surely can help for this.

-- Alexandre

On 9/12/07, Jordan Mantha <mantha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> After some discussion with Daniel Holbach and Matthew East I would
> like to propose that the Ubuntu Packaging Guide be moved from the Doc
> Team repo/website to the wiki.
>
> Here are some reasons for doing so:
>  * the packaging guide has been essentially unmaintained for a couple
> releases now. There are a lot of things I would have liked to have
> done but just have no time for. There are only so many
> people,especially devs, who are willing to learn docbook, etc.
>  * I am a firm believer that the Ubuntu Packaging Guide should be a
> community project where the people who are actually packaging are
> doing the writing
>  * it needs good technical review from developers
>  * as Ubuntu develops the Packaging Guide will naturally need to be
> adapted to new policies and procedures.
>  * all the other development documentation is on the wiki (MOTU docs
> and UbuntuDevelopment)
>
> The disadvantages I see are:
>   * we probably won't have a nice printable version for a while
> (moin->PDF or moin->1 HTML page is not easy)
>   * since the wiki is editable to anyone ( usually a good thing) there
> is the possibility of people doing bad things, either accidentally or
> maliciously, to the packaging guide.
>
> So, my current plan is to "import" the packaging guide to the wiki
> (probably using the wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide namespace)
> hopefully sometime before UDS-Boston. I will probably need lots of
> help cleaning up the wiki pages after the automatic docbook->moin
> conversion.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -Jordan Mantha
>