why make it so hard to download Fedora documentation?

[Eric Christensen]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:42, Brian R. Murphy <brianrmurphy at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Eric Christensen <
> eric at christensenplace.us> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 00:54, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/29/2009 07:55 PM, Brian R. Murphy wrote:
>>> > Sorry to bother you personally, but you seem to be responsible for the
>>> > FAQ, and there is no "feedback" link for the Fedora documentation page.
>>> >  I don't really think this question should be in the FAQ; I think it
>>> > should just be fixed.  But if not, perhaps you can add this question
>>> > (along with some answer) to the FAQ:
>>> >
>>> >     * Why do you make it so hard to download Fedora documentation?
>>> >
>>> > I would like to download the Fedora 12 documentation for off-line
>>> > reference while I'm upgrading.
>>> >
>>> > Unfortunately, the documentation page
>>> > at http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ has a "clever" UI with select menus
>>> > that trigger navigations themselves (rather than a separate go/download
>>> > button), making it very arduous to "save as" the result.  There also
>>> > doesn't seem to be any way to just grab the latest bunch (or even a
>>> > single one).  There's not even a way to "save as" the PDF links, and
>>> > some quirky browsers (like the one I have at work) don't handle PDF
>>> > files too well directly.  While it wouldn't be as pretty, a simple file
>>> > listing would be far more useful.  If you're going to pretty it up,
>>> > please don't screw up basic usability.
>>>
>>> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ - Select PDF which is the third option
>>> and Language.
>>>
>>> Rahul
>>>
>>>
>> What format are you looking at saving the files?  We provide html,
>> html-single, and PDF.  If you want to save the html-single it's simple
>> enough to select the appropriate file and language and then save-as once the
>> page loads.  PDFs generally download on demand.
>>
>> --Eric
>>
>>
> I just want to quickly get something I can read off-line.  If you had a
> simple index page, I could just right click on each link I want (PDF or
> one-page HTML), "save link as", and have them load in the background.  If we
> were lucky there might be a tar/tgz/zip or something similar and I can just
> download one file and unpackage it myself at my leisure on the train.  (See
> http://tldp.org/docs.html for some ideas.)
>
> With your page design, with my high latency connection, I have to select
> the appropriate file, busy wait for it to load, save-as, then go back and do
> it again.  I can't even choose to open each "in new tab" since your page
> design precludes that.
>
> -Brian
>
> Our future rollout of Zikula should remedy this, I hope.  There were more
problems with the previous version of docs.fp.o, though, that had to be
fixed.  With so many languages available for some guides it was almost
impossible to list everything appropriately.  The link you provided doesn't
take into consideration what language the person would like to read the
guide in.  We have eighty-nine possible language translations which would
quickly make a page very crazy to load on a high-latency network connection.

What would you expect to find in a tar file?  A PDF?  HTML?  Raw XML?
Everything?

If you are after the html-single, yes you have to wait for it to load before
saving but it doesn't take any more time than just downloading it in the
first place.  PDFs should download when you click them.

--Eric
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/attachments/20091130/21df4856/attachment.htm>