ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Luke,

On Mon, 2010-08-02 at 22:37 +0100, Luke-Jennings wrote:
[...]
> unfortunaly my knowledge on the subject is not that great along with the
> lack of time I have at the moment I am not much help. I was wondering
> how it is going and if we are at the stage of having another meeting to
> decide on a format?

Sorry to change tack slightly, but I'm wondering whether the format
discussion should be deferred until some more important issues are
resolved. If we choose an XML format, we can always transform to other
formats with a bit of work.

I discussed the content pool in passing with a few GNOME docs guys at
GUADEC, and one particularly serious concern was how the content would
fit together. Books are written in a different style to help topics,
which are written in a different style to training worksheets (and what
have you). How would chunks of material from the documentation pool be
reused for different purposes?

My thoughts were that reuse would require significant editing (making
material from a help topic flow better when used in the book context,
for example). But surely this would remove a major benefit of having a
shared pool: namely, reduced translation duplication?

Do you have any ideas on how we can overcome problems like this? I'm
worried that, in practise, documentation from the different teams would
overlap in subject but not in style, so we'd either have a pool
containing items which are only suitable for one team, or items which
need significant (and destructive) editing to get them to work together.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm