Re: RFC: New debian package - ddoc

[erik <devvnull@crosswinds.net>]

On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, you wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 11:20:28AM -0700, erik wrote:
> >  This is simply an initial announcement of a new debian package called
> > ddoc.
> [...]
> 
> Have you seen what doc-central does (available as .deb in unstable distro)?
> See if you can integrate this functionality in it.

Sorry, I hadn't noticed this one: I'll look into it.

> No offense, but IMHO Debian doesn't need yet another unfinished
> documentation thingie floating around in the archive... let's try to
> concentrate our efforts.

 I fully agree; that was part of my own motivation for ddoc - it is
partially an attempt to tie up some of the lose ends. For instance it
provides links to dhelp and dwww ( in future it will have a little CGI
to look for them and "exec" or give a little message explaining why they
aren't avaliable). This is to cover for the fact that both of these
seem to have a hard time making it to the menu system and both have
strengths in different areas. 

 There are also links to www.debian.org/documentation and the local LDP
HOWTO'S  and so on, and we plan to implement man2html & info2html pages to
support legacy docs.

 Development has just begun on this and although Pavel has a number of
very far reaching ideas, my own part is too make a functional system that
is complete in at least the aspect that I just dsecribed. The added
benifit is that it auto-generates default content with at least some
useful info gleaned from the .deb given as an argument. 

 This is also to address the fact that it should be easy for developers
and maintainers to write docs and/or integrate them into the system -ddoc
does alot of this for you and then it leaves you with 8 pages already
filled in with a little bit of content and a default outline to fill in.
Then a second command will package these into a deb. I guessed that the
reason the dhelp and dwww pages were not well populated is simply that it
is a pain to integrate your stuff with them. Ddoc will perform that
service with two commands and no editing if you like.

 Sorry, hope I didn't rant too long ;-}.

 Thanks for the tip and the thoughts,

erik