Re: current document policy ?

[Adam Di Carlo <aph@debian.org>]

Clarifying my own response here:

>>>>> "Adam" == Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com> writes:
>>>>> "John" == John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu> writes:

John> Thanks to everyone who responded.  I am getting my packages
John> registered with menu and doc-base for potato.  I am a bit
John> concerned about doc-base. I understand that doc-base has some
John> design flaws that you want to fix. 

To clarify this, there are is one design flaw with doc-base, which is
more of a flaw with the whole system:

  local documentation chain can get into wierd states, and
  debugging can be hard (this is when you combine maintainer scripts
  in any order, dhelp, and dwww).  I've worked out a solution in
  principle, where a central 'document store' is maintained in
  /var/state in RDF format.  Display systems can either hook into
  particular document installation events, reading the individual
  metadata (as they do now), or can use the central store directly.

Note: this problem is one where a generic 'post dpkg run' hook
mechanism would help enormously.

There are a few "misfeatures" or things I want to fix:

  (a) more metadata tags -- I'm intending to use the Dublin core
  metadata standard, while still accepting the old format files.

  (b) extensible handling of file formats (i.e., info files could be
  handed off to install-info) -- again, solvable with a hook mechanism

  (c) display systems such as dwww and dhelp should use a
  "interchange" format and not read directly the file formats that
  packages feed to doc-base; this gives us the flexibility to offer a
  few different formats to package maintainer.  My hope is to extend
  debiandoc-sgml so you don't even need a separate metadata file

  (d) extensible menu heirarchy

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>