menu policy & use of doc-base for programming documentation

[Eric Cooper <ecc@cmu.edu>]

The Debian OCaml maintenance team is looking at how to organize the
HTML documentation provided by the various OCaml packages.  Our first
thought was to use doc-base, but according to the doc-base
documentation, the hierarchy is determined by the Debian menu
sub-policy (http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/menu-policy/).
The current hierarchy is only 2 levels deep, and places all
programming language libraries and tools in the same "bucket":
Apps/Programming.  This makes the dhelp browser front-end to doc-base
almost useless as a programmer's documentation browser.

So, should we propose (on debian-policy) that the hierarchy be
deepened to 3 levels (Apps/Programming/{OCaml,C,Python,Perl,...})?

Or should the doc-base policy be cut loose from the menu policy?

The advantage of either of these is that we don't have to reinvent the
wheel for our documentation browser.

Another approach might be to add some more advanced filtering or
narrowing to dhelp, etc. but that requires duplicated effort in all
the clients of doc-base; and rolling our own tool, like perldoc, is
the least attractive.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u