Re: Repost, really need help: Need to know where the Gnome User manual resides in CVS

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Hey Alexander,

Very sorry for the late reply.  The fact is, nobody really
knows how everything works at this point.  The Documentation
Project is in complete disarray.

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 16:32 +0200, Alexander Shopov wrote:
> Please guys,
> I really need help.
> 
> I have a Bulgarian translation of Gnome User's Guide. I want to merge it 
> in CVS, so that it can be further updated.

Long-term, we really want to be doing our translations using
xml2po.  Currently, however, gnome-user-docs isn't set up to
use gnome-doc-utils.  This should really happen for 2.14.

I don't really start looking at the documentation until after
feature freeze, due to my responsibilities as a maintainer
for Yelp and gnome-doc-utils.  And even then, I never manage
to complete all the work that needs doing.

> I would like to know where in CVS is this gnome users' guide:
> http://gnome.org/learn/users-guide/2.6/
> 
> I would also like to know how it is being upgraded to reach
> http://gnome.org/learn/users-guide/2.8/
> and
> http://gnome.org/learn/users-guide/2.10/
> 
> They are all mentioned here http://gnome.org/learn/

The User Guide is in the gnome-user-docs module, under the
gnome2-user-guide directory.  The last real revision of the
User Guide was 2.6.  It was tagged for a 2.8 release, but
no substantial work was actually done on it at that time.

The User Guide is horribly out of date.  And without an
active community of good technical writers, I can't make
any guarantees as to when it will cease to suck.

> I checked out the following modules from gnome CVS:
> 
> gnome-user-docs: it seems to contain GNOME users' guide 2.6 but I am not 
> so sure about the newer versions. I need someone to confirm that this is 
> the place to commit to and update and sync to.
> 
> gnomeweb-wml: it is not obvious how to build the exact web and pdf 
> versions on the Gnome site.

The stuff on the website was, I believe, always being built
by hand.  And the PDFs were being built by Sun using tools
that I've never seen.

This is a huge problem.  The general consensus is that we
need a "library" website where all of our documentation is
automatically built and put online in one easy-to-browse
location.  But nobody's done the work.

> I would very much like to integrate the build up of the docs in GNOME CVS.

If you've done the work to translate the User Guide, great.
But much of it will have to change if it's ever updated to
be current.  Until it's current, I refuse to make a release.
That just gives people the impression that the documentation
is actually useful, which it isn't.

If you want to do documentation translation work, your effort
would be best spent translating documentation that has seen
revisions in the last release cycle, preferably one that's
already set up to use gnome-doc-utils and xml2po.

--
Shaun