lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Phill,

On Thu, 2010-07-01 at 23:36 +0100, Phillip Whiteside wrote:
> as one who does not use gnome, my little two cents worth is that
> instructions should not be tied 100% to gnome. Whilst the vast
> majority use 'vanilla' ubuntu, there are other flavours. As ubuntu is
> ubuntu, should we be as aware of that as we are translations? 
> Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc. Each of the flavours has translation teams and
> I'm sure some translators work on more than one flavour, the 'base'
> installation documents need to cover all that is common (grub, kernel
> etc) after that how does for example, the chromium browser team from
> ubuntu work with those from kde work with xfce, work with lxde etc ?
> I've seen some excellent wiki pages that put in the difference between
> gksudo and kdesu. One easy example for lubuntu (allbeit not a fully
> fledged ubuntu yet) is that it would be leafpad and not gedit that is
> the shipped programme for people to do that lower level of editing
> with.

The use of Mallard with other (non-GNOME) flavours of Ubuntu is a little
more complicated. I think Xfce may be willing to adopt Mallard, but I'm
not sure what the situation is with KDE. The others I have even less
idea about.

Where instructions can be written generically they should be, but there
are going to be lots of instances where GNOME-specific instructions have
to be used. Trying to write too generically will confuse users, and
providing multiple instructions in one topic would also be confusing
because then users have to figure out which DE they're using every time.

In order to promote re-use between different flavours, perhaps we can
come up with some system of flagging-up completely reusable topics, and
topics which can be reused with some editing? That way, the job of
editing Ubuntu/GNOME docs to work with Kubuntu/KDE or whatever could be
made easier. There was also talk of a "conditional element" feature in
Mallard that would insert the right material depending on the DE that
was running, but that could get complicated and ugly. It's something we
should play around with, anyway.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull