Re: Contribution of Sun documentation team to the GDP.

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 03:47, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 18:07, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> 
> > > More ideal would be using a revision control system that supports
> > > distributed development and easy repeated merging of branches ;)
> > 
> > May I suggest GNU ARCH ? ;)
> 
> You may of course, but I intentionally didn't mention it specifically. 
> I just wanted to raise awareness that the kind of problem Mark was
> describing has been solved today by several free software revision
> control systems, and it might be useful to give consideration to one of
> them.

	The "kind of problem" here is not so much that we have two branches of
some content and we need to keep those branches in sync, but rather the
nature of the content itself.

	AFAIR, Pat and co. use a docbook editing tool which generates the XML
and I imagine that would it very difficult to cleanly merge changes
between revisions, no matter what version control system you're using.
I'm waiting for someone to tell us that there is a nice XML diff tool
out there - I seem to recall that there is.

	One other thing we've relied on Sun's docs for in the past is the
translated docs. Its one thing for us to try and keep the english docs
in sync, but it'd be a whole other massive task to do the same for the
translated docs. I think this problem may well be solved by Danilo's
xml2po project which would make it much easier for our own translation
teams to translate the docs rather than to rely on Sun's translations.

Cheers,
Mark.