Fragmentation in Linux Documentation?

[Karsten Wade]

A belated follow-up that has been sitting on my desktop ...

On Sat, 2007-04-21 at 22:45 +0200, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:

> Has docbook something like ifdef ?

Yes, although the exact mechanism for XML escapes my ability to recall
at the moment.

> So a
> 
> make fedora
> 
> would produce the manuals in Fedora oder Ubuntu flavor ?

Right.  I think the mechanics of sharing a common base with distro
variants is the easy part.

The hard part is stuff such as - different community styles; different
expectations of quality, quantity, etc.; different writing styles;
difficulty in creating an upstream with the authority to enforce style
guidelines, etc.

> Another problem I hit several times is to keep various languages in
> sync. If you don`t see excatly what changed in the original-document,
> it`s near to impossible.
> 
> So keeping the documentation per chapter or even smaller in a cvs would
> help.

We typically do this modularity for DocBook, sometimes down to the
<section>-per-file.  Not sure how this would work with the POT file;
perhaps there could be some way to group/ungroup/regroup from modular
files.

- Karsten
-- 
   Karsten Wade, 108 Editor       ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
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