[FM Discuss] including FLOSSmanuals in FLOSS distributions?

[adam hyde]

hey,

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 22:41 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> 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.
> > 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.
> 

this means developing a export tool chain, and an integration path for
each...

> > > 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?
> 

im hesitant to provide tars...i think its the wrong approach, but please
convince me otherwise...

the reason i think its not the way to go is because the FM content is
dynamic...if we provide tars they just sit there and perhaps get updated
when someone does a package update, and then they must update the entire
source for the list of manuals or for each manual separately...

for this reason i think RSS would be a better option...then we can build
it so only those manuals or chapters in manuals that have been changed
get updated and the updates could happen more regularly (this increases
the likelyhood a user gets the most recent manuals, and it will be a
lighter bandwidth management issue than tars)...its also easier for us
to integrate this as we have a tool for making the manuals available as
feeds (we just havent used it yet)

this is why i thought of ff /  a gtk reader


adam

> > 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.
> 
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-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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