two notes

[Deb Richardson <deb@linuxcare.com>]

Just to interject on a couple of points from discussions that have been
taking place on this list recently:

First...

Guylhem mentioned automating the LDP submission process.  The easiest
way to do this is to get that CVS system you've been working on up and
running.  That way authors can either get accounts and do updates
themselves, or they can send their updated docs to a central place where
any one of a number of volunteers with CVS accounts can commit the new
doc into the tree.  This is how the OSWG deals with it, and it really is
quite effective.

Additionally, if you have a CVS system of this sort, you can also
automate the process of generating the docs into the various output
formats.  Again, this is how the OSWG system works, and all it takes is
one small shell script and a simple perl script.  The scripts are run
daily so the output formats are never more than 24 hours out of sync
with the DocBook instance in the CVS system.  I'd be happy to pass along
a copy of our scripts -- they cannot be used "as is" since all the
paths/etc are hardcoded in, but you might be able to emulate our system
fairly easily.  

I haven't had a chance to look at your CVS system...is there a page out
there about it anywhere?  I'd be interested in seeing what structure you
decided to use.  The OSWG has emulated the structure that the FreeBSD
Documentation Project uses...it allows for various languages to be
separated out, etc. 

Second...

If/when the LDP does decide to merge the miniHOWTOs in with the HOWTOs,
I recommend leaving a copy of the miniHOWTOs in their current location
for a while.  Chances are that there are at least a couple of dozen
pages out there that link to each of them.  The LDP doc tree structure
has been around for an awfully long time, and changing that structure is
not to be taken lightly or done radically & suddenly.  Make it known
that the /mini dir is deprecated and give folks plenty of time to update
their links.  I imaging that a year would be sufficient warning.  It
might seem like a long time, but better to overshoot than underestimate,
really.

- deb


-- 
Deb Richardson, Executive Editor
Linuxcare, Inc.
tel: 613.562.9723, fax: 613.562.9304
deb@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com

Linuxcare.  Support for the Revolution.


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