[Pan-users] Re: Documentation (was: 0.134 and Beyond)

[Petr Kovar]

Hi!

Charles Kerr, Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:41:47 -0500:

> On 09/29/2009 02:36 PM, Petr Kovar wrote:
> 
> > However, it's obviously up to the Pan's main author to decide in which
> > way he wants the Pan docs to be distributed, that is, whether to
> > distribute simple HTML files linked (most likely) from the Pan's Help
> > menu, or whether to use the approach common among the GNOME modules,
> > i.e. to distribute XML file(s) and use GNOME's Yelp as a help viewer.
> 
> I think they should be in a wiki somewhere, written and maintained by
> pan-users, so that improvements to the documentation can show up
> immediately instead of having to wait for the next release of Pan to
> be made and propagate through the various distros.

Okey, thanks for you quick reply. :-) So, if I understood correctly, you'd
prefer not to integrate the DocBook manual into the Pan's sources, right?

As for the docs-in-a-wiki idea, I think that's actually quite a fair point,
and in fact we already have this unofficial FAQ in a form of wiki. Maybe
moving the FAQ to a more suitable place (e.g. to live.gnome.org as it's a
wiki utilized also by other projects that depend on GNOME infrastructure,
or perhaps set up a wiki on Pan's official website, if it's possible) would
improve the situation a little bit, though.

On the other hand, having everything in a wiki means that the documentation
is unavailable when the user is offline. Hence many projects offer user an
offline form of documentation, and then, on the Net, there's a FAQ in a
wiki. Personally, I like this idea best.

If anyone else has some thoughts please feel free to add them. :-)

Best,
Petr Kovar