[FM Discuss] including FLOSSmanuals in FLOSS distributions?

[Andy Oram]

I just had a moment to go back over this mail, and I had a couple thoughts.

Adam seems to be promoting the idea of obtaining the latest documents online instead of "bottling" documents for a distribution. Certainly, the conventional wisdom now is that everything should be kept in a safe, central location and downloaded just-in-time. So a button that connects someone conveniently to the relevant chapter of a manual fits this model.

But we also all know that not everybody has Internet access all the time, or high bandwidth. (I don't think FLOSS Manuals are big documents, even with pictures, but even so...)

But the main consideration may be something different. What Paul is reminding us, I think, is that GNU/Linux distributions like to come prepackaged. And that includes documentation. It might be nice to have a few FLOSS Manuals on the next major Ubuntu disk, for instance.

But I suspect it's too much work to convert our HTML into some other format. I think readers would be satisfied displaying the docs in a browser.

Andy