[FM Discuss] including FLOSSmanuals in FLOSS distributions?

[Douglas Bagnall]

Paul Wise wrote:

> 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?


We could probably work this into the new booki.  An obvious next step
after automatic tarballs would be to put in a Makefile so that people
could go "make yelp" or "make chm" and the appropriate format would
appear.  That should shift some of the burden of maintenance outwards.

It would be possible to do that with TWiki too, but it is trickier to
get a clean tarball (as TWiki throws in several bits of its own), and
we're trying to scale back our work on it.

Mature FLOSS Manuals (i.e. the ones you see on the home page) are
snapshots anyway, so I am not sure if share Adam's concerns regarding
up-to-dateness.  Depending on the package maintainers, new versions
should into distros fairly rapidly.

This echos that other discussion of whether or not we do editions.



Douglas