[FM Discuss] including FLOSSmanuals in FLOSS distributions?

[adam hyde]

hey Paul,

Nice to hear from you.

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 20:00 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> [Please CC me on any replies, I'm not subscribed]

> I'm listening to an interview about FLOSSmanuals from wintercamp by
> Gabriella Coleman and I have some questions related to FLOSS
> distributions.
> 
> Are any of you planning on packaging the manuals and distributing them
> in FLOSS distributions such as Debian, Fedora or Gentoo?
> 

We discussed this a while ago. It has always been our intention to do
this, but working out a good way to do it, and who would do it is the
question.

> The site says the manuals are distributed under the GNU GPL. One aspect
> of this license is the requirement to distribute "source code". What do
> you consider to be the "source code" or "preferred form for
> modifications" for the manuals? I note that you're using TWiki, I guess
> the "source code" would be the twiki markup?
> 

the source code is the xhtml of the manual, or whatever other format
they might be converted to.

> How might one "build" the manuals for distros and what format would you
> expect the manuals to be in when installed on distros?
> 

I was thinking that it would be good to build a gtk manual reader or
work out a nice way to build something into Firefox (/Ice weasel) -
perhaps a FLOSS Manuals addon that would simply display all recent
manuals and update the list and the content via RSS and store it in a
cache...if we could build an addon like this it would be useful for many
other distros...if it was included in the default install of ff for each
distro then it is a very simple but useful solution with a potentially
large install base

do you think this is a realistic way to go?

> Perhaps you could provide regular tar.gz snapshots of the "source code"
> each manual, versioned by the date of the snapshot so that distributions
> could use these tarballs to add FLOSSmanuals to distributions?
> 
> BTW, twiki was recently forked to Foswiki so the community could grasp
> back control of the project, you might want to consider switching to it:
> 

yes, i was involved in trying to mediate in the weeks before the fork.
Unfortunately there was nothing much that could be done, too much ill
feeling between the founder and many of the dev community, that in the
end the fork was inevitable.

we are not intending to switch, instead, we are developing our own
platform ('booki')

adam

> http://foswiki.org/
> 
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-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about