On 3/22/07, Karsten Wade <kwade@redhat.com> wrote:
Good idea.  Having this discussion in the open makes sure we are all
working from a common ground.

Absolutely. Thanks for replying!

Such as, have a mapping of content to who owns it?  Then issue an email
that is a diff or a patch?

This was my thinking, yes.

That's not a bad idea.  It could get annoying, so maybe we need a way to
bundle up all the changes into one send, v. sending every time someone
saves a change to the wiki.

Two ways that jump out at me.
(1) Do a batch run. So N days before a release, we run a script that makes one big diff per page and send it out to each respective maintainer.
(2) Have a Stable page version. So each change doesn't get a patch release, but once we have a reviewer/editor approve a set of changes, they move the Stable bit up to that version of the page.

I think this stretches waaaaaay back to an old Red Hat Docs Team goal of
converting all the man pages to a DocBook format, and then work on
improving them.

The main motivations I can think of are:

1. Provide useful, Fedora-specific content (man/info pages that only
appear in Fedora)
2. Make this content available in many ways (CLI, WUI, but if they were
XML, they could appear in GNOME Yelp or KDE Help)
3. Contribute fixes back upstream to improve the state of all content

It is the latter that is truly the most interesting ... and also the
hardest to accomplish.

#3 Is really my end goal, I think. First, get all the documentation into some common format (DocBook, XML, a MySQL database), and then have some facilities to export (and push changes) to various upstream and user interfaces. Web, GUI, CLI, etc. The more the better, so long as they serve a useful purpose.

Of course, this is a big project that most be broken down into various, bite-sized steps.

--
Michael Burns * Security Student
NET * Oregon State University