Lampadas Concerns

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

David-

I have read most the documentation about Lampadas on the web and have
visited the system through the fake account.  I still have a few
questions about the system in general.  From what I've seen the code for
lampadas is in the LDP CVS.  Is this correct?

I saw that you wanted stylesheets for the GNOME project to identify it. 
There are two places they are kept.  The multiple file version of the
customizations are in GNOME CVS gnome-docu/gdp/xsl.  These might need a
logo added to them for your use of identifying the documentation with
the GNOME project, but that is trivial to add.  The single file version
is in GNOME CVS yelp/stylesheets/yelp-custom.xsl.  You need to add an
<xsl:import/> tag to the top of it to make them work because there is a
driver stylesheet which alters the HTML so Yelp can display it.

I think the GDP has some goals for a document management system[1]:

1) Easy viewing of documents to determine their state.  This covers
whether the document is unmaintained, maintained, edited, OMF file
completed, can be built by the app, written, in progress, or not
written.  The GDP looks more at documentation on a per application basis
than a per documentation basis.  Because of this I will refer to
documents as documentation for apps which have and have not been
written.

2) Grouping documents together to easily find an area of interest.  New
people first starting out in GNOME are typically bewildered with the
choice and variety of apps.  We want a way to group documents so people
can easily find an app which interests them and is not documented.

We would like to achieve the above goals and the goals you stated in
your Design Notes.  I don't think there is a lot of interest in
collaboration features because the GDP uses CVS for this work.

I think Lampadas does a good job of grouping documents together. 
Hopefully the categories can be changed to more GNOME specific
categories, but I don't think that is a big obstacle.  Also a search
engine would be nice for the future.  I'm sure you thought of that
though.

I'm more concerned with ability of Lampadas to display the status of the
documents in its database.  Currently Lampadas does not display any
status of the documents in the Document Table by default.  I don't know
if this can be easily changed or not.

It would also be nice for Lampadas to automatically check from CVS the
last date the document was updated.  This would give the GDP a good idea
of what documentation is old and which needs to be updated.

Another feature is to have a field for different version of GNOME.  This
is different from the document version because sometimes the document
versions and the GNOME version the documentation was written for aren't
the same.  This would allow us to sort the documents in Lampadas based
on the version of GNOME and check for older documents which need
updating when a release is coming.

Basically I think Lampadas should have a configuration file where the
administrators can define the defaults and have the ability to add
fields into the Document Details section.

I like Lampadas a lot and hope to see it grow into a mature document
management system.  As the projects grow in the Linux world management
becomes an ever increasing challenge.  With tools like these we can meet
the challenge and excel.

Eric Baudais

[1] These are my opinions and a guess at the group's opinion as a whole
but not necessarily those of the entire GDP.