Re: All those GNOME FAQs

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2000 at 03:24:23PM -0500 or thereabouts, John R. Sheets wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a question about the state of all the GNOME FAQs floating around.
> Which is official?  It looks like Telsa did a good job of putting
> together the users-faq-1.2.  But how does that relate to the rest of the

Thank you!

> FAQ material?  Are the original gnome-faq and devel-faq too obsolete to
> salvage?

Original gnome-faq: almost certainly. It got too long, then too out
of date, then too hard to contact authors.

Someone had the bright idea of splitting it into user and devel sections.
They dumped most of the content into the new user one, and started a
sort of "this is the way we could start it" effort for the devel one.
And then I think things stopped.

I have more to add to the user one, but it's in reasonable shape, I
think. The devel one is... (looks).

Well, I can't vouch for the CORBA stuff. Beyond me. Numerous links are
now dead. The imlib stuff probably needs updating to refer to gdk-pixbuf
as well and the differences between them. I suspect the GTK+ bindings
section needs augmenting. The SGML section needs filling in or removal. 
The i18n stuff should probably refer to the gnome-i18n list. There are
more languages to add (whatever happened to the Papiamento people? They
got bogged down in what code they would be allowed to use and sort of
vanished. I still think they should have just grabbed "pp" :)).There is 
nothing in it about Glade, and this is a big big oversight now. 

I am not a hacker, but these seem to me to be things that need to 
be fixed. It's certainly salvagable (although I think it needs
restructuring, but then I just have problems with a list of sixty
entities at the top :)). 

> I'm asking because I'd like to include one (or more?) of the GNOME FAQs
> in the Appendix of my soon-to-be-released (in September) book on GNOME
> development.  The book covers GNOME 1.2, so I want to avoid really
> crusty material.

Don't use the old GNOME users FAQ. It's very very out of date, and tells
people to do things which now won't work. No-one has sent in any "you 
broke my computer" reports to my new one. I promise, I shall do my best to
have the latest version up by the end of the weekend. There is a
later CVS version than the current HTMLified one if you can't wait.
I've been putting it at http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/GDP/ for now. 
This is because pestering someone with www.gnome.org access to rebuild 
it and put the latest version onto the website seemed a bad idea whilst 
it was in a relative state of flux. Now it's getting reasonably okay, 
we need a nice tidy "doesn't blow up" script to grab it from CVS, build 
it, run it through 'tidy' (yes, we do need this :)) and put the results 
on www.gnome.org because otherwise someone will have to go and redo 
it every time I correct a misplaced comma.) 

If anyone wants to take on the developer FAQ, I have a couple of
questions it could use, but alas, no answers!

Telsa