Re: [Evolution-hackers] future of evolution user docs.

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan novell com>]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 11:32 -0500, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 17:00 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
> > The doc team here uses Frame and it has only an export to xml and so
> > syncing from the commits/svn is no way possible, unless the frame is
> > modified manually. If there are any better alternative that can be used,
> > lemme know, I can try and propose to use for Evolution. Even otherwise,
> > we try our best not to overwrite any commits, instead we incorporate
> > them and do the commit. There were exceptions before, I hope that won't
> > continue. But, I'm open for alternative solutions if any. 
> 
> I think the core issue here is what is considered the "master" copy of
> the documentation.  This being an open-source project, the master copy
> *should* be the DocBook sources in GNOME Subversion.  It sounds to me
> like the master copy is some proprietary-formatted document locked away
> inside Novell.  This creates a bottleneck for community contributions to
> the documentation.  Approved patches should not have to flow through a
> single gatekeeper.
> 
> I don't care what tool we use to maintain the docs but the work flow
> should be similar to any other source code change: checkout or import
> the master copy from Subversion, make your changes, and merge them back
> into the master copy.  If FrameMaker is not conducive to that kind of
> work flow then we should look for a different tool, even if that means
> editing DocBook sources by hand.

Frame files are the master copies here. You think committing Frame files
to svn would solve it? If so, I would be happy to do that. I'm open to
propose a new tool to the doc team here for Evolution if any. Definitely
hand editing the entire doc file isn't going to be easy. Maintaining
7500 lines file, with so many pages, images etc isn't going to be easy.
Every release we do many features and fix so many bugs, that would cause
approximately 500-1000 lines of corrections. Manual editing isn't
feasible. It would create more troubles than before.

-Srini