Re: Bug#566364: RFH: doc-central
On Sat, 2010-01-23 at 12:53 +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:50:38 +0100
> Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 11:18:57AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> > > Just out of interest, what's the difference between doc-central and
> > > dwww ?
> >
> > That's a pretty damn good question :-)
> >
> > I've made the choice between dwww and doc-central several years
> > ago. _IIRC_ , back then dwww was missing decent browsing of the doc-base
> > sections which is my main access path to documentation; more generally,
> > I liked dwww more back then. FWIW I've just re-looked at dwww after
> > your prod, and it seems that it has improved a lot over time.
>
> Agreed - and as dwww has progressed, doc-central appears to have
> stalled. The Documentation Menu in dwww covers all I need from doc-base
> and the addition of man page browsing, info document browsing, viewing
> any file in any /use/share/doc/ directory and automatic linking from
> changelog.Debian.gz to the BTS and similar - it's all really neat. Add
> in the dpkg-www package to link to the Packages / apt cache data and
> doc-central could have a lot of catching up to do.
>
> The only thing missing (for me) from dwww is an area covered by devhelp
> - and even then a simple symlink is enough to make things like the
> gtk2.0 reference manual available in dwww.
>
> devhelp has useful integration with some IDEs so that's why I use that
> one as well.
>
> > If the point of yours, beside curiosity, was also to phase out
> > doc-central in favor of dwww, that might be an option, but then
> > agreement should be sought between the two packages maintainer and a bit
> > of smooth upgrade path should be provided.
>
> There are plenty of situations in Debian where users have a choice of
> options that have pros-and-cons. Personally, I don't see a need to
> migrate - yet - as long as doc-central is usable and does the smaller
> task of just the doc-base files, it is probably worth having both.
I don't use either. I gave a quick-try to both of them.
If I where to use one of them, I would probably use doc-central, because
it doesn't depends on any indexing tools (dlocate, squish...).
> If there is any particular content that advises doc-central over dwww
> (on www.debian.org or on the Wiki) I'm not aware of it, so it's left to
> user choice.
It's best if packages pros/cons are summarized in package description.
Here's a page for g**glers (contributions are welcome):
http://wiki.debian.org/doc-base
Franklin
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