Hi, [I tried to send this yesterday, but apparently it didn't arrive on the list. If it did arrive and you now get a duplicate my apologies. The original version explained that I had some internet connectivity problems. I am happy that those are solved now. New info, not in the original message is in brackets.]
Since people care about what we publish at our project website I thought it was a good idea to forward the following information (attached) on how the documentation and webpages are build to the list. I send this to Patrik already, who wanted to help spicing up the pages a bit, and who now seems to actually enjoy WML, so please coordinate with him. On suggesting/linking to non-free software (since the topic came up). We want GNU Classpath (and everything found through the gnu.org website) to enable people to be free from any control on how they can use or create java-like systems. We really want it to be so perfect that people can be sure that if they follow advice/links on gnu.org to certain software packages they will get free software, which they can use, study, modify and distribute however they want. That is a high standard, but our users will appreciate it when they know they can depend on that. On the specific case of org.omg and jgss. I think Stuart is right that it is better to not point people to these implementations as long as we cannot guarantee that we are suggesting something which is free. But please lets at the same time try to find solutions for our users. It would be great if someone could take a quick look at JacORB to see if that is something we can suggest to people looking for free software. And references to standards that can help with implementing replacements (such as RFCs) should of course go into the Hacking Guide. [Thanks to Stephen Crawley for the the rundown of how OMG works and what their priorities are. Clearly their priorities are not our priorities, but I hope we can work something out so that we can provide a free software implementation of the Corba standard. If Brian can help me with his contacts at OMG, I am happy to help negotiate something.] The above is not meant as unhelpful religious zealotry, disalowing choice or declaring things illegal. It is meant as a practical guideline to make sure that we empower our users which come to gnu.org for information on Free Software. There are enough other resourcesoin non-free proprietary things, which I think everybody can already readily find. No need for us to do that. But if people really think it is that impractical then having a www.classpath.org which is not directly affiliated with www.gnu.org might actually be a good idea. It would make it much more clear what kind of things people can expect to find on the "official" http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/ page and what other kind resources are available. But I hope it will not be necessary. [Now, with all that said, please take a look at how the documentation and webpages are actually build. Instructions attached at the end.] Cheers, Mark --- [Documentation and webpages] If you want to work on helping updating/maintaining the webpages (http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/) then you start by looking at the doc/www.gnu.org/ directory in the main classpath cvs module. The first thing todo would probably be to update the README file in there to make it a bit more friendly for other people to contribute. For example adding some of the rest of this email after you verified I don't talk nonsense would be nice :). Currently the Makefile uses two tools for generating the webpages: - WML: http://thewml.org/ Debian package (wml) - texi2html: http://texi2html.cvshome.org/ Debian package (texi2html) The manuals should be written in texinfo whenever possible since that gives us the most flexibility to generate different formats and it is the GNU standard for creating documentation so it fits in the best with the rest of the system (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/ has lots of documentation and guidelines for GNU manuals). WML is just a nice thing to quickly create smaller webpages, and I would recommend its use unless someone comes up with a really better way to easily create those pages. When you have these tools installed then just typing make in doc/www.gnu.org/ should do all the magic needed to convert the texinfo manuals (doc/hacking.texinfo and doc/vmintegration.texinfo) and the wml pages into html. Transfering the generated pages to the actual www.gnu.org machine is done by copying the generated files to the GNU Classpath webpage repository (see https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=classpath). All other support files that must be present on the webserver can also be found in that CVS module. There is a convenience make target 'publish' that helps with that. Guidelines for www.gnu.org(/software) content can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.software.html http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.editors.html http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html Some hints and tips (symbolic links and generating timestamps) can be learned from: http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.html There is also a mechanism to generate the api documentation using gjdoc (only available from cp-tools in CVS I believe) when configuring with --enable-gjdoc. This will then generate HTML files in doc/api/html. There is currently no simple way to upload these to www.gnu.org though. And generating the correct copyright/license statement for them is not a completely solved problem, although it shouldn't be that hard. _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath