[FM Discuss] including FLOSSmanuals in FLOSS distributions?

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 16:20 +0200, adam hyde wrote:

> 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.

Good to hear.

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

Ok.

> 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?

The various desktops have specialised documentation systems, yelp in
GNOME for example. I'd recommend packaging the manuals as normal
packages and hooking them into these systems. You could also hook them
into the FreeDesktop menu somehow to add a Help menu item and populate
it with FLOSSmanuals and other documentation. This is much more likely
to be useful and visible than what seems to me to just be a bunch of
bookmarks in one specific browser.

> > 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?

Do you have a response to this question?

> 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')

Ah, OK.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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