Re: Docs packaging

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Karsten Wade wrote:
On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 01:03 +0200, Peter Boy wrote:

Am Dienstag, den 23.08.2005, 17:56 -0400 schrieb Paul W. Frields:

* Since docs are not absolutely necessary to run a system, Extras seems
like the right place to me.

Hm, if there is a lack of documentation you can't use a lot of systems.
Obviously many people can use Fedora despite of a current lack of
documentation (as we see from FC1 to FC4  :-) ), nevertheless I would
vote to have the documentation in the core package (at least in the long
run).


Viscerally, I agree.  However, size is a problem we have to deal with,
and end-user docs with lots of screenshots are big.  And we do hope to
have translations of most of the important ones, so then everyone wants
those included.

For the record, application documentation that comes in the package and
usually ends up in /usr/share/doc/ is not part of this discussion.  We
don't own or affect that content, at least, not directly.


Perhaps it is possibly to differ between several documents.

- User guide (if we would have it), yum guide, release notes, etc. part of core


I could see rallying for this, if the package was small.  The relnotes
exist, and have grown with a screenshot and more text recently, and a
general Fedora Desktop User Guide that had many good bits within would
be quite useful.

Unfortunately, those who need such docs are usually the ones who need
more screenshots than CLI usage, and thus the size of the docs grows
hugely.


- program related guides bundled with the program (e.g. Samba guide in the Samba devision), either in core of extra, depends
 on the programs location


We would have a harder time arguing for Samba docs to be available in
Core just because Samba was.  I think these are perfect for Extras.

Despite where they live, the docs packages could simply follow the debian docs package naming policy:

  Documentation for package foo is in the package foo-doc

Doing it this way eliminates the need for coordination with upstream.

* I would like the /usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html file (which is part of
fedora-release, and comes up when people launch Firefox) to show a SHORT
and informative menu on how to:

 * Read the release notes
 * Install and update software, in particular Fedora docs
   (i.e. "yum install fedora-docs\*" plus link to Stuart's yum doc)
 * Access fedoraproject.org, especially the Wiki
 * Get involved in Fedora (probably also through fp.org)

Debian systems have a very nice setup for the /usr/share/doc/index.html (produced by the dhelp package and which shows up via apache as http://localhost/doc/HTML/index.html) as well as a number of cgi-based packages that allow access to all the docs that are registered (via packager tools) in the doc system.

The dhelp system looks like this (on some random machines):

 http://www.sosst.sk/doc/HTML
 http://nestor.wlu.ca/doc/HTML

DHelp Homepage: http://www.fifi.org/doc/HTML/


There's also the cgi-based "dwww" package (more random servers):

  http://darbujan.fzu.cz/dwww/
  http://borg.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/dwww/

Which is much more powerful - check out the links (my apologies to the server admins:-)


And finally, the "doc-central" package (more apologies):

  http://epoxy.mrs.umn.edu/dc/
  http://gregscomputerservice.com/dc/

which is also cgi-based and quite nice.


I dunno if such developer & user tools exist for fedora system, but they'd be very nice additions. (wishful thinking here)

I'd also like to second Dave Malcolm's suggestion about packaging the xml sources so they register in both gnome & kde help systems. (Caveat, I know how the yelp system works in this regard, but am completely ignorant of the kde doc/help registration.) I do know that it's not at all difficult to package xml source files so that they show up in yelp.

My $0.02...

Cheers,
Mark

--
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Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx>
OS Product Documentation
Engineering, Red Hat, Inc.       <http://www.redhat.com>
Tel: 919.754.4151                Fax: 919.754.3708
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