Re: DDP vs LDP -- should be DDP + LDP
"Havoc" == Havoc Pennington <rhpennin@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:
> The Tutorial improves on the User's Manual in some ways: - all the
> examples are specific, and work unchanged on a stock Debian
> system. The User's Manual is often forced to do this sort of
> hand-wavy "and then you do some distribution-specific thing..."
> bit. Most commercial books ship with a CD and use that distro for
> the examples. - it has Debian/GNU propaganda thrown in - it is more
> up to date - it is in SGML rather than LaTeX
All valid and good points.
> Its disadvantages include not being quite as finished, though I've
> almost caught up, I think...
Yes... do you think you'll be able to maintain it long-run?
> Working with LDP people would be fine with me, if any LDP people
> want to work on it... we'd need a scheme IMO to basically #ifdef
> some regions of the manual (#ifdef DEBIAN, #ifdef REDHAT).
SGML has these facilities. In the preamble, or from the cmd line, or
whatever:
<!entity % i-am-debian "INCLUDE">
Then in the document:
<![ %i-am-debian [
conditional text
]]>
It needs though w.r.t. the structure...
> I am linking LDP stuff from within the tutorial, and they get
> prominent mention near the beginning as another resource.
That's good...
> One IMO major caveat to the LDP stuff is that the default LDP
> license does not permit distribution of derived works. The User's
> Manual was an exception (which is why I could make a derived work
> specific to Debian). Installation and Getting Started appears to be
> GPL, so that is an exception too. Anyway I strongly believe that
> our docs should permit derived works.
Yes.
> Since I hack Gnome a lot, I eventually (like in a year or so) want
> to have a Debian Default Desktop for Newbies and some chapters in
> the tutorial talking about that. That's something that may be
> totally Debian-specific and wouldn't go in an LDP manual.
> Besides the Tutorial, the important piece of documentation for
> newbies is Linux Installation and Getting Started. The problem with
> Linux Installation and Getting Started from our point of view is
> that Debian moves config files from "standard" locations, and the
> Debian install section of LIGS is maintained separately from
> install.html. I'd think making install.html into simply the Debian
> section of LIGS would make sense.
Yes, perhaps! Since I'm taking over the Install Manual (it's SGML,
not HTML, btw) I'll look into talking to the upstream LIGS and getting
something included. I'm not sure that LIGS really wants all that
detail from the install manual ...
I better track down LIGS now, and see if it has anything interesting
there...
> The other problem is that installing and configuring Debian involves
> text editing and other things covered in the tutorial, so LIGS ends
> up covering a bunch of basic Unix concepts, so then you end up with
> a bunch of overlap and it's kind of silly. I would like to see the
> installation part broken out so it could simply be prepended to the
> tutorial, and then add a couple of configuration chapters
> (X/ppp/ethernet, basically) in the relevant places in the
> tutorial. Then you'd have a nice single document; someone could
> print it out, keep it handy, install and start using Debian without
> having to look elsewhere.
> But I don't really have that kind of time, so I am just trying to
> get the tutorial part done eventually.
Hmm. Clarify, please! What do you see as the interrelationship
between the Install Manual, LIGS, and the Debian Tutorial? I can
conditionally give you pieces of the Install Manual for inclusion in
other documents.... Remember I'm going to start conditionally building
the Install Manual for different architectures. I'll look at LIGS more
closely (hadn't thought about that, doh!) and correspond with the
upstream person.
*grumbing about practicing what I preach*
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
Reply to: