Hi all, * Shaun McCance: > On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 03:31 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: >> On Jul 5, 2007, at 7:30 PM, Matthew East wrote: >>> ... >>> The basic problem we are having though is that Ubuntu customises quite >>> a lot of Gnome, and as a result the Gnome documentation is wrong, and >>> we need to correct it. An example is the layout of the System menu, >>> which in Ubuntu does not contain the screenshot/lockscreen buttons, >>> but which are part of vanilla Gnome and therefore documented in the >>> Gnome user guide. >>> >>> The two possible ways of correcting these are: >>> >>> 1. Creating patches on the Gnome documentation in the Ubuntu packages >>> of gnome-user-docs. >>> 2. Creating a separate tree with a copy of the Gnome documentation (to >>> be updated from time to time) and shipping it separately in a new >>> package, or with the Ubuntu-specific documentation. >>> ... >> There is a third way: Use distributed version control. >> >> The GDP could have its own branch, Ubuntu could have its own branch, >> and any other distributor that used a customized Gnome could have its >> own branch. Ubuntu could merge any useful changes from the GDP, while >> ignoring those that weren't relevant to Ubuntu. The GDP could merge any >> useful changes from Ubuntu, while ignoring those that apply to >> Ubuntu-specific customizations. And if two or more distributors made >> the same customizations, they could merge corresponding documentation >> changes from each other. This is an interesting idea. I'd very much like to find out how easy it is to merge/reject different changes from a branch while maintaining a patch. > Could distributed version control help alleviate these > issues? Possibly. I'm not a big version control geek, > so I haven't really played with these other systems. > But it's unlikely the GDP upstream is going to change > systems unless Gnome does so. Although I think I've > seen people blog about using bzr and git with bridges > to svn, so maybe you guys can do that on your end. Ok, let's give this a go. I've arranged an import from svn to bzr through Launchpad's semi-automatic feature: https://code.launchpad.net/~vcs-imports/gnome-user-docs/trunk The next step would be to try to create an Ubuntu-customised branch, and to try and merge any updates coming into upstream which don't conflict with such changes on a regular basis. I don't know much about how bzr works so hopefully mpt will help out with that. > This is why I generally don't like vendor customizations. > The cost of maintaining a code patch is generally very > low compared to the cost of the auxiliary patches, such > as documentation and translation. I'm with you: they should be kept to a minimum. Sometimes however, they are necessary so it makes sense for us all (even Gnome as upstream) to think about potential ways to overcome the issue. Matt -- http://www.mdke.org gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature