Man Pages
Hi,
We recently gained some volunteers to write man pages for the console/daemon
KDE apps, and so we've been doing some experimentation with DocBook to set
this up.
We are specifically not wanting to use *roff as a source format, because
we've gone to some lengths to automate and simplify the translation process,
and DocBook is an excellent source format for this type of documentation -
the manual pages will of course be converted to *roff, probably during
compile time.
I've just been informed however, that the Debian KDE packages have already
been creating manual pages. A cursory search through our CVS finds me a
handful of these, three in the kdebase module to be precise.
It's entirely possible I'm being blind and not seeing them - or it's possible
they aren't in our CVS tree. In any case, I have some questions:
1: Where do I find them, and how can I get them (bearing in mind I don't
actually use Debian, or even Linux in fact). FTP or anonCVS access is fine,
or even webcvs, I just don't really know where to start looking.
2: To avoid duplication of effort, is there any objection to us (KDE) taking
the already written man pages and converting them to DocBook, and then moving
them into the doc directory of each module? All existing credits and
copyrights will of course be left intact.
Having them in the main CVS <module>/doc/ hierarchies will mean they are
translated into most major languages and quite some minor ones as soon as
they are committed, which you must agree is a good thing.
3: If this is the case, that there are Debian written manual pages outside of
KDE CVS, and if in fact you would like to carry on writing them, perhaps we
can discuss a priority list, or some division (or at least, which end of the
long list we should each start at,) to save our new volunteers and your
writers covering the same applications. As I mentioned, we were planning to
concentrate efforts on the console apps and daemons first, as they currently
have no documentation at all.
I'm not subscribed to your list - I did bookmark the archive page at
http://lists.kde.org, but it will probably be quicker to CC me with any
replies.
Regards,
--
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation Team
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