Re: General GNOME User docs

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Here are my thoughts:

I have no objections to users guide, but I personally would hate to
update it for 1.4 - merging in all the new material about nautilus
etc. If dave will do it - great.

On the other hand, talking about a "comprehensive" desktop doc - do we
really need it? "Comprehensive" means it must include all about
nautilus, all about panel, sawfish (like it or not, window manager is
as important as file manager), probably some key applets, such as
taskbar, maybe even  control-center... Isn't it too much?
ANyway, in the current form users-guide-1.2 is not so much users guide as a
reference manual, useful for looking  something up, not for reading as
one document. 

I'd rather vote for having a short "intro to gnome" with links to
manuals to individual components (panel/nautilus/...), and 
a common index covering these core documents. This is as good for
looking something up as a single comprehensive doc ans much easier to
maintain - not to mention that this way, we do not duplicate other
documents.  


One thing for which users guide can be really useful is as *printed*
manual. But shipping it as html files the way it was in 1.2, IMHO, is
inefficient use of our own (dcm's first of all) time and bandwidth. 

Another thing: I am not sure about shipping glossary - at least, not
until nautilus people make some interafce for looking up in the
glossary  an unfamiliar word in docs. We discussed several ideas about
this before, but it doesn't look like they will make it in 1.4.  

And yes, I think it is a good idea to include FDl, GPL, etc so that
any doc can link to them by using some standard URL, such as
<help:gpl>

Finally: I'd like to include my pet project,  "If you are new to
Linux.." doc (which was an appendix to UG in 1.2) in the new
documentation package as well - if people think it is worth it. My
wife seems to appreciate this kind of "newbies" documentation. 

Sasha

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 07:28:27PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> We need to decide the fate of the GNOME Users Guide(UG).  On the one hand,
> it is a fair amount of work to maintain and is a duplication of existing
> docs.  On the other hand, it is the only somewhat comprehensive GNOME user
> doc and we need it for the web and hardcopy.  Also, some people would
> rather read/look things up in the UG instead of trying to find the right
> document out of the large pool of docs on their system.  We can also
> possibly index the UG, which would make it even easier for users to find
> the documentation they are looking for.
> 
> Another idea would be to morph the UG into a new document, say "The GNOME
> Desktop".  This would probably be very similar to the UG, but would only
> consider things which one would consider part of the "desktop".  So we
> would not include things like games, most applications, or fun applets.  
> It would only include things which one might consider part of the
> desktop.  While I like this concept (dividing GNOME into the "desktop" and
> then applications), it may be very tricky to decide where to draw the
> line.  We may wind up making it more inclusive then exclusive, in which
> case our document is the same as the UG.  If we do create a "desktop" doc
> (which may just be our UG), then we could make it the default doc which
> one searches when one pops up the help browser (Nautilus) and searches for
> a topic.  This way a newbie could pop up the help browser (Nautilus), go
> to Search or Index, and type in any topic relating to the GNOME desktop
> itself.
> 
> We will also want to ship some other user docs: 
> 	GNOME User FAQ
> 	Glossary
> 	Introduction to GNOME
>         (maybe UG)
> 	(others?)
> 
> We may want to ship copies of the GFDL, GPL, and possibly other licenses
> in here too.  Thoughts?
> 
> When Sasha and I were discussing all of this, we decided it may be best to
> lump all this together into a single package called
> "gnome-user-docs".  Sound good?
> 
> Dan
>