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

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 23:21 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
> Frame files are the master copies here.

I think that should change if at all possible.


> You think committing Frame files to svn would solve it? If so, I would
> be happy to do that.

The preferred work flow should be to import the DocBook sources into
FrameMaker (or whatever), make changes, and commit changes back to the
DocBook sources.  Ideally, there should be no need for intermediate
files like Frame files.

If that's just not feasible with FrameMaker then adding the Frame file
to SVN would at least help resolve the perception that Novell is keeping
an iron grip over the Evolution documentation.  But I think that should
be a temporary measure until a more DocBook-friendly tool can be found.


> 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.

Agreed.  I'm a bit out of my element here.  Maybe Andre can chime in
with some suggestions.  What tools does the GNOME documentation team
use?  Surely we're beyond hand-editing XML files (/me hopes).

Here's a few possibilities, but I don't much about them:
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookAuthoringTools

Matthew Barnes