Re: Lampadas Concerns

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 07:06:04PM -0500, Eric Baudais wrote:
> 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?

Correct, in /lampadas.

I'm not sure what documentation you saw. The stuff on my home page is
somewhat outdated, since it has been taken over by actual
implementation. You know that design and implementation never match
100%.

For the up-to-date, maintained documentation, see the Lampadas
Developer's Guide at http://www.lupercalia.net/lampadas/, or in
/lampadas/doc in the cvs for the most current.

> 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.

Great, thanks.

> 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.

Funny, I was just thinking about that this afternoon. I am going to
add the ability to include a list of categorized applications, and
link documents to them.

> 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.

Right.

> 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.

Yep, but not implemented yet.

> 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.

See the old LDPDB at http://db.tldp.org. That's how the Lampadas
DocTable will work when it is finished. You can sort and filter by
many fields.

> 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.

I'll do that. That type of reporting is pretty easy to add.

> 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.

You can't add fields to the database ad-hoc, but we could make it
possible to configure which fields are actually displayed. Which would
accomplish the same thing from the user's perspective.

> 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.

That's the idea.

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Lead Developer                                 http://www.tldp.org


My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the
basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said.
This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can
be.
	-- from "Conversations with Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan