[Fusionforge-general] Cleaning up installation docs

Olaf Lenz lenzo at mpip-mainz.mpg.de
Thu Nov 26 12:03:13 CET 2009


Hi!

Maybe I was unclear: I do not want to move the whole manual to the wiki!
I am only talking about the installation docs. This is not in the 
context-sensitive help, anyway, as it has to be available before 
fusionforge is installed.


> 2) Having the manual under SCM allows to maintain separated stream of the documentation.

This is true. I wonder however how important that is in the case of the 
installation docs. It is true that it would make it harder to install 
older versions of FusionForge, but do we want that? And is the 
installation procedure likely to be different for different branches?

Furthermore, being able to read the manual already requires a user to 
build the manual, which is not trivial. So most users will probably use 
the manual on the web. Then it would be necessary to keep and maintain 
the manuals of all published versions of FusionForge.

In any case, currently it is a mess: some installation docs are in the 
wiki, some are in the manual, some are in various other files in the 
source. I think it would be important to have all installation docs 
available at one place only, so that it is not necessary to maintain two 
versions. This could mean either to put everything into the docbook 
manual, or to put it onto the wiki.

Using the wiki would have the following advantages:
* Can be updated quicker than the manual that comes with the release.
* Easier to modify, also for users that do not use the source code.
* Talk pages allow users to comment on their problems. However, this 
would basically open up yet another place where users would put 
questions (besides IRC, mailing list and forum), so it is probably not a 
good idea.

Using the docbook manual would have the following advantages:
* The installation manual would fit to exactly the version of the source 
  code that it is delivered with.

Olaf




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