Re: Fedora Publishing

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On Fri, 2016-02-05 at 08:55 -0600, David Ashley wrote:
> 
> one solution put forward was to figure out how to accept a variety
> of 
> input formats into a process that produces the output we want.
> Obviously 
> some conversion of the input will need to be performed so that a
> common 
> output can be maintained.

I think this is key.  But there is something else we seem to be
ignoring; we need a way to produce reasonable hardcopy output.

Much of the time you NEED the documentation you don't have access to a
computer or the Internet.  When you look something up a lot of the time
the small chunk is very handy.  But when you are in deep doo-doo you
often need to be holding a piece of paper in your hot little hands.
Even when things haven't totally gone south, a lot of processes leave
you without access part of the time, and you either need to scribble
down the next steps or have a good memory.

And there is another dimension that could help (and maybe this again
has to do with conversion); it is handy if hardcopy output is dense.
Even our current model produces documents that perhaps focus more on
form than function. That is, they look nice but contain a lot of wasted
space.  For the hardcopy output, you really want a minimum number of
pages in preference to looking pretty.

Man pages are pretty nice this way, although when they get a little
longer they tend to become more opaque.  And the main problem with man
pages is that you need to know the answer ahead of time.  One very nice
feature of man pages is that you can print them and get something
usable.

Online documents almost want to be the opposite.  You would like plenty
of whitespace to help organize and highlight the content.  But when you
try to print a wiki you get a huge pile of useless paper.

We were pretty close with translation of the wiki to docbook, but mw-
render wasn't kept up to date, and not a lot of folks used it because
it only did a 95% job.  I guess whatever we have has to be polished.

Stickster mentioned that we should look to existing tools, and I like
that idea, *IF* we can find something that works.  Our history is
littered with tools that looked like they mostly did the job but were
eventually discarded because they couldn't really do what we expected.

Someone earlier mentioned a git-based wiki sort of tool that sounded
close, but that appeared to be closed source so I didn't look too hard,
but given all the expectations we have, I'm skeptical.

On the flip side, as David mentioned, we are a group of volunteers, and
as such, tend to be kind of fluid.  I have little doubt that Pete or
myself could grok together something that works, but then even if we
are still around a few more releases, real life will interfere with
needed maintenance.

Not sure of the answer - lots of dimensions.  But don't loose sight of
the features we already have when looking for new ones.

--McD




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