On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 23:42:02 -0700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Also another idea which came of of a discussion with Mr. Nagarjuna > @GNUnify was that we could have a subscription kind of service for > corporates and individuals. We can mail the update CDs every 3/6 months. > I was thinking something on the lines of MSDN which we lack for > GNU/Linux.
Simply providing a CD containing all the documentation won't make a big contribution since tldp.org already provides download packages for all manpages, info docs and howtos. Those are also included on distro CDs, AFAIK (not sure about howtos). MSDN is extensively indexed and has very structured information. We can do such a thing for GNU/Linux if we provide a searchable heirarchy of documents. Man sections are quite limited in this regard and I'd suggest another level of grouping based on package types. E.g. in section 1 (applications) we have subsections like Accessories, Development, Games, Graphics, System and so forth (preferably matching their RPM (or .deb,if such exist) categories. Man pages and info docs have well-structured information, so it's possible to provide a consistent browser interface for those. A tree-structured navigation for all the docs in one place would be great. Lastly, there's a question of output formats. Most howtos are available in HMTL, postscript and PDF formats. Converters are available for man and info pages to HTML though I am yet to see their PDFs. I'd suggest packaging these resources in their native (troff, texi, docbook...) formats and providing a facility to convert them atleast to HTML and PDF formats during installation. To summarize, we have to: # Agree upon a common document structure # Look for applications that can be used as documentation browsers # Decide upon common output format(s) # Provide converters for the above format(s) Comments are welcome :-) -- Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST) http://staff.ncst.ernet.in/tahir tahir AT ncst DOT ernet DOT in We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed -- _______________________________________________ http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
