Hi, We recently gained some volunteers to write man pages for the console/daemon KDE apps, and so we've been doing some experimentation with DocBook to set this up.
We are specifically not wanting to use *roff as a source format, because we've gone to some lengths to automate and simplify the translation process, and DocBook is an excellent source format for this type of documentation - the manual pages will of course be converted to *roff, probably during compile time. I've just been informed however, that the Debian KDE packages have already been creating manual pages. A cursory search through our CVS finds me a handful of these, three in the kdebase module to be precise. It's entirely possible I'm being blind and not seeing them - or it's possible they aren't in our CVS tree. In any case, I have some questions: 1: Where do I find them, and how can I get them (bearing in mind I don't actually use Debian, or even Linux in fact). FTP or anonCVS access is fine, or even webcvs, I just don't really know where to start looking. 2: To avoid duplication of effort, is there any objection to us (KDE) taking the already written man pages and converting them to DocBook, and then moving them into the doc directory of each module? All existing credits and copyrights will of course be left intact. Having them in the main CVS <module>/doc/ hierarchies will mean they are translated into most major languages and quite some minor ones as soon as they are committed, which you must agree is a good thing. 3: If this is the case, that there are Debian written manual pages outside of KDE CVS, and if in fact you would like to carry on writing them, perhaps we can discuss a priority list, or some division (or at least, which end of the long list we should each start at,) to save our new volunteers and your writers covering the same applications. As I mentioned, we were planning to concentrate efforts on the console apps and daemons first, as they currently have no documentation at all. I'm not subscribed to your list - I did bookmark the archive page at http://lists.kde.org, but it will probably be quicker to CC me with any replies. Regards, -- Lauri Watts KDE Documentation Team
