Re: Docbase in policy
Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
Hello friends,
I found doc-base to be a *very* usefull tool(?), I use dhelp and
doc-central a lot now and registered the docs on my packages on it.
I agree! Isn't it great?
I've tried to request that we make more widespread use of this excellent
doc-base feature, by:
* Filing wishlist bugs against Netscape and gmc requesting
Recommends: dhelp and bookmarks or desktop links into
/usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html [all refused].
* Filing a similar wishlist bug against gnome-help-data, which
resulted in a link named "debian" to that file in the GNOME
Documentation section.
I read in the TODO file for doc-base that work was being done on
including doc-base into the policy (or a separated policy, it seems)
how's the work going?
The short answer is "I've no idea", but since Woody policy seems to have
been frozen, I don't believe that is happening with the Woody release...
I do have one little beef with doc-base: it seems that none of the front
ends make use of the PostScript or other non-HTML documentation formats...
Moving on, one longer-term issue is that, as with so many other things,
the rest of the world is slowly catching up to Debian, so there are new
cross-distribution alternatives. IMHO, it's good to support such
cross-distro systems in some way, both to leverage new technogoly and as
some kind of a good neighbor. One of these is Scrollkeeper, which
manages OMF-specified documentation metadata for packages much like
dhelp/dwww etc.
What to do about this? Some suggestions:
* Ignore it because ours is better (large existing base of support,
etc.).
* Switch to it completely because the new stuff is better, e.g. nice
multilingual capability IIRC, and is cross-distro so our
meta-tagging can be used by non-Debian users (I recall hearing
there are still a few such people around :-).
* Create some two-way compatibility, so we can both incorporate
doc-base metadata into the Scrollkeeper framework such that apps
which browse the Scrollkeeper archive can access this body of work
which Debian devs have put together, and also incorporate
Scrollkeeper/OMF metadata into doc-base frontends so we can have
the opposite work.
* Write some tools to convert package.doc-base files into some
OMF-compatible format, or vice-versa.
My own investigations into such things have dead-ended at the vacant
Scrollkeeper documentation skeleton (why do people do that??). Perhaps
others can more intelligently discuss the options based on more
extensive knowledge of this and other alternatives; this post is mostly
to provoke thought/discussion. :-)
Cheers,
--
-Adam P.
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