Customising Gnome Documentation for Distributions

["Matthew East" <mdke ubuntu com>]

Hi all,

In a number of places, the user-guide speaks of "Gnome" (or "GNOME").
However, many users won't know necessarily what that is, as they will
think of their desktop as "Ubuntu", "SUSE", or "hey you". Given that
Gnome is always being run on top of a distribution which is likely to
have a more prominently displayed name (on the CD, the boot screen, on
the login screen etc), I think there is a problem caused by using the
phrase "Gnome" so often in the documentation. For the Ubuntu specific
documentation which we add to the desktop help system, we always
describe the system as "Ubuntu", which is only natural. However it
raises clashes where the upstream documentation uses the phrase
"Gnome".

Obviously, this raises an issue about the mark and its use in
distributions and I haven't read anything about that so I would be
happy to read some definitive information about Gnome's approach to
such issues.

Although I suppose it would be possible for us distro-types to go
through all files and find/replace, I think a better solution would be
to use an entity in the Gnome documentation instead of the word
"Gnome", which distributions could then easily customise with a one
line patch.

This seems to be related to Matt Keenan's patch here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336185 although I've never
played with gnome-doc-utils (and Ubuntu doesn't use it for it's
distro-specific documentation) so I have no idea how it works.

Any thoughts about this? If the entity solution is feasible, I'd be
prepared to work on a patch to implement it.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF