Re: Request from Debian packagers: please don't ship debian/ in tarballs
> Since Ben takes objection to my characterisation of some of the man pages,
> let's leave them out of the equation.
I have no doubt that you understand that documentation is time
consuming, and also that it is a never-ending task since documentation
needs to be continually revisited and checked against new application
versions (even if there are few or no visible updates as a result). For
the modules that I look after, documentation accounts for a significant
chunk of packaging time.
Given the fairly large amount of time that I have poured into manpages
over the years, I hope you understand why "Ben took objection" to the
implication that most of the debian manpages are automated cruft.
Anyway.
To the issue at hand, which is manpages in the main KDE repo:
- As far as my contribution goes, it is fair to assume that I will only
have time to work on manpages when it comes to packaging, which is
generally after the release has been made. This means that I probably
won't be able to commit to the main documentation directories due to
pre-release freezes and the like.
- Given this, I will continue to keep manpages updated for the modules
that I maintain (wherever they end up being stored). However, I have
less time nowadays, and so I have given away kdeartwork, kdetoys and
kdewebdev to other packagers. My contributions to those modules end
at KDE 3.3.x, and so their manpages have not been updated for KDE 3.4.
For KDE 3.4 and beyond, the manpages I am still looking after are for
kdesdk, kdeedu and kdeaddons (plus koffice with its separate release cycle).
- Again, since I do not have the time that I used to, I cannot offer to
help with the docbook transitions myself.
These issues may affect whether you want to add these modules to the
main documentation repo or not.
For all of the above reasons, I have not been pushing KDE to incorporate
these manpages upstream, since I do not have the resources to maintain
them on KDE's stricter release schedule. KDE is aware that they exist,
and it seems inappropriate for me to push any harder than that. Hence
my past silence on this issue.
> I will mark up and add to the KDE repo
> all the ones still left in the modules he mentioned (which I note was
> something that had already been started.)
I noticed when I got to packaging KDE 3.4 that some kdesdk manpages had
indeed been converted to docbook. Unfortunately these were from an
older KDE release, and so those manpages are a little out of date
(presumably a consequence of the fact that I do packaging after the
release is made). I have mentioned this to the KDE people at one point;
again, for the reasons above, I have not pushed any harder than that to
get them updated.
Anyway, the previous paragraph is just an FYI. For the modules that I
am still looking after (kdesdk, kdeedu, kdeaddons, koffice), the
manpages in the debian dirs for the KDE/3.4 branch and trunk are now up
to date for KDE 3.4.0.
As a final note, please do not take any of these comments as opinions
for or against keeping debian dirs in the KDE repo. I am commenting
here on the issue of manpages and nothing more.
Ben.
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