Re: Status of Project Mallard

[Don Scorgie <Don Scorgie org>]

I'll take this one for 20, please Bob.

On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 23:24 +0200, Alejandro Serrano wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been surfing a bit thorughout the Gnome wiki, and I've found some
> interesting bits about something called Project Mallard (in
> http://live.gnome.org/ProjectMallard). I would like to ask what is the
> status of that project, and how it relates to Rarian, Foie Gras and
> all the things that are mentioned in that page.

Project Mallard was originally the name for the new markup language.
However, as it's grown, it's become more of an umbrella term for all the
changes.  This includes the new markup (confusingly still called
"Mallard", at least by me), the new documentation editor (Foie Gras) and
the new meta-data stuff (Rarian).

As an umbrella, various parts are now progressing.  First, Rarian is now
part of GNOME 2.20 and it's cool new stuff will hopefully begin being
used in GNOME 2.22.

Second, Foie Gras.  This was worked on as part of the Summer Of Code by
2 students and is currently being integrated to form a first release
(hopefully).  The editor is exclusively for the Mallard Markup.

The markup itself has a (stylesheet) implementation inside
gnome-doc-utils I believe and the plan is to get an initial
implementation into GNOME 2.22, with work then beginning on converting
manuals across after that.

> 
> Indeed, I would be very interested in contributing, but I don't know
> where to start, or who ask to.

There's loads to do.  It's a question of where you want to work ;)  If
you want to help out in any way, the best thing to do is pop into #docs
on irc.gimp.org and ask people there.  I've got a few tasks on Rarian
that need doing (but I suspect documentation meta-data is sufficiently
boring that no-one except me is really interested).  Otherwise, I'll
pass over to shaunm and he can give some tasks out...

Hope this was (at least slightly) helpful
Don