Re: Gnome and Ubuntu UGs (Was: string freeze?)

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Hi :o)

On Sat, 2006-12-23 at 18:14 +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> You're just scared of the word "fork", it's not nearly such a bad thing
> as you think (see below).

[joke]Yes, you have me cowering in a corner, please stop using that
word :o)[/joke]

> It's not really a question of working together or apart. In the next
> version of Ubuntu, we want to present separate topics to make the
> material more navigable, and simply plumping the Gnome User Guide in as
> one of these will not work: the User Guide tries to be a "complete"
> guide to Gnome.
>
> However, individual chapters of the Gnome User Guide can fit it well, so
>  we plan to simply select the appropriate chapters, and use them as
> topics. There is no point in us redoing material if it is present in a
> similar form in the Gnome documentation.

Quite. If I understand correctly to "select" a chapter in this case will
avoid some sort of copying-pasting, please explain if this is not what
you are planning.

When talking about working together I was referring to the proposals for
somehow making it trivial to use parts of the GUG in a downstream
distribution without any modification. One of the things Joachim
proposed was to chop the guide into smaller files. The idea being that a
distributor, such as Ubuntu, could simply pull the latest release of the
guide before publishing and plug it in without any other work than
copying the files.

Could such a solution assist you in integrating the GUG into your
documentation as you have been planning ?

> > > Matt, if you change the GUG to fit in with your docs, I'm guessing you
> > > would have to redo the changes anyway when GUG is updated. What
> > > advantage would a string freeze give you, other than assuring the Ubuntu
> > > docs are no more out of date than anybody else's ?
> 
> I don't really understand this question - the idea is to use a document,
> and I'd rather use it after bugs have been fixed than before, depending
> on when that stage is reached.

I'll try and explain this better. If you use a document, the GUG in this
case, one day as the document changes upstream, you will have to update
said document. If you had made arbitrary changes to the document, these
changes will need redoing.

If what you are suggesting is indeed comparable to copy-pasting parts of
the GUG into your documentation (from what you have explained, this
seems to be what you are considering), then every time we update the GUG
you would have to re-copy and re-paste the contents into your docs. We
are simply proposing to try and make this easier, and some of the
suggested solutions would make a documentation freeze seem irrelevant.

Do you have any ideas how we could make it easier for you to achieve
what you are trying to do considering we do not have a documentation
freeze ?

Love, Karderio.