I personally like the idea of having a joint documentation. There have been several people playing (working?) with live-docs in the last few month - but afaik from the pear-doc-team there is not yet something definitive when we would have the chance to switch to livedocs (correct me if needed). Meanwhile since pear-doc only rebuilds once a week one or two people have set up builds on their private servers that function as a possibility for people without the possibility for pear-doc-compilation to see if their contributions work or if there are link-errors etc.
It would also imho be nice to have the projects on a joined doc-site since this would function as a central source of information.
However, a short while ago in a meeting we've agreed to integrate things like Wiki-docs and user-contributed notes for the pear-doc. Am I correct that these projects can be paused for now? How soon do you think the joined doc could come reality?
Another point that I've lately got involved with is CHM-doc-building from the pear-doc. Dieter Raber who did build our CHM-docs in the past has a few days ago assembled a package of his scripts together with basis documentation. Currently the CHM-docs don't exist for all languages and are not as up-to-date as the HTML-version. We've talked about reviving the CHM-docs again. Would this also be not needed, if we join the documentation-forces? Do you also plan to supply (automatic) CHM-builds on the new server? (Okay, I know there needs to be some Windows-machine actually to do the final step of putting the CHM-
together.)
Well, seems like you misunderstood this a bit. We are planning on setting up a joint website first, and the manuals would still be accessible at the places our users already familiar with. Livedocs will help in distributing the documentation quicker (and making instant testing very simple). That said, we are not in the process of setting up a build machine, but rather a support machine for those who work on the documentation stuff. This site would host DocBook XML source generators (for peardoc and possibly PHP-GTK), check scripts, status reports, howtos, etc.
We are not planning to hold you back at all from implementing Wikis, user comments, more powerful CHM docs, etc. Livedocs will be capable to generate CHMs in the future, it is on the TODO list, but livedocs is not there yet. It will not be capable of working with pear completely, if more peardoc people will not join in anyway. Mehdi put a lot of work an thought to make it compatible with peardoc (and other doc projects).
Now I would like to ask you to just think about this a bit, and if you are interested in the development, please provide your opinion on how would it be best to discuss the further directions (crosspost replies, a designated mailing list, personal emails, IRC, or something else?)
Imho a new mailinglist would be a good idea. But I'd vote to first not list it on lists.php.net to the public. Using crossposts or private emails seems less practical to me. Everybody interested from the document-teams can join in on such a new list if he feels like it.
The first aim is to set up a CVS module to place code of this website into, then grant people with access to that module, so we can build up features quickly. A separate mailing list might be a good idea too...
Goba
