Re: Contents

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 04:39:13PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> The Contents needs to be able to detect all the documentation installed on
> the given system (info pages, man pages, HOWTO's, FAQ's, and
> GNOME/KDE/other SGML/XML files).  It then needs to sort this all into a
> reasonable heirarchy, preferably by subject, not format or title.  We will
> need to come up with a nice categorization.
> 
> The one idea I have heard is similar to the one you mention - each
> documentation file is accompanied by a meta file which describes the
> documentation file, and perhaps explicitly says where it belongs in the
> contents.  We discussed this briefly at GUADEC, although in no great
> detail.  This file should ideally be packaged with the documentation.  It
> could be one file per document, or one file describing multiple documents.  

This sounds like the most reasonable idea - something like .desktop
files describing applications, only for docs. Note that it makes
possible for us (GDP) create these metafiles even for docs which we
didn't create, such as LDP. 

Can anyone come out with a suggested format? It obviously should
containt title, version number, brief description, format
(man/info/html/DOcBook/plain text), file location (both local and
internet), and probably more.  jrb, elliot: do you have any suggestions?

AFter we have a proposed format, we can try to discuss it with LDP and
KDE people. 

Sasha