discuss: a year work and work in progress
Subject:
a year work and work in progress
From:
"jdd for http://tldp.org" ####@####.####
Date:
18 May 2009 10:05:24 +0100
Message-Id: <4A1123B4.50308@dodin.org>
Hello :-)
I'm not very fond of anniversaries, but I still want to remember than
approximately a year ago a discussion started here that, in fine, gave
a new kick off to the LDP.
So may be it's time for some kind of summary of the work done and the
work still to be done.
What was done and is working is the setup of the wiki, the refreshing
of the mirror list, the scan of the existing HOWTOs looking for the
licence (not to speak of a new hardware for the servers, fairly
administrated by Ser, and good relations with ibiblio folks).
What is in the way but not working as expected is the translation from
HOWTOs to wiki and more challenging from wiki to docbook.
Porting a HOWTO to the wiki still need some manual work. The script
don't work completely well, and still work only from html. This page
http://wiki.tldp.org/Converting-a-HOWTO gives most of the info.
This problem, however, is not very important because this have to be
done only once (for a given HOWTO) and so is manageable. main problem
are URL and table management. the script (htmltodocbook) is available
and any help is welcome.A year ago it was said that we could convert
all the HOWTO at once, it could be now a good idea to do so is anybody
knows how :-).
The other side conversion, from the wiki to docbook is much more
important because it have to be done each time a HOWTO is updated and
sometime it's often. So the manual steps I have to do are too many.
http://wiki.tldp.org/Exporting_to_docbook summaries the problems. On
my opinion, there is nothing really difficult, but the news are bad:
the script author do *not* anymore maintain it and a new MoinMoin wiki
is to be released that will unvalidate the present script.
I my personal opinion, a console script able to convert the raw Moin
page to docbook should be better than the present online system if
possible. The script should be simpler and could be run
non-interactively in the ldp system. Now it's python. Python
programmer needed.
BUT may be all this is of little importance. Do we still need this
conversion at all? Do we still nead docbook at all?
Of course the docbook toolchain will be kept as long as there are
docbook subscriptions, but do we need to keep docbook source for all
the HOWTOs?
Right now and from the beginning, the LDP offers HOWTOs in several
formats:
* html (one page and several pages)
* pdf
* plain text
* plucker db
* source
I don't even know what is Plucker db. Is this still usefull? How can I
test if this version works?
plain text and html are easily done from the wiki and firefox can do
pdf (as we can)
Tere is a project, quite in good shape, to insert in the Static
(mirrorred) LDP site a static version of the wiki.
Could it be possible to simply link the relevant HOWTOs to this static
site and drop nthe docbook conversion (unless the conversion is one
time and asked by the maintainer)?
What is not as well done as I wouldlike is the LDP advertisement. We
lack too much authors and volunteers. We have may be one wiki
subscription a week :-(
http://wiki.tldp.org/FrontPage?action=info&hitcounts=1 shows that the
wiki home page is hit 50 times a day, slowly encreasing but fairly low.
We have a volunteer to revamp the LDP Home page, what should be a good
idea...
We have also yet to port to the wiki a lot of the old site that should
be better there, but these pages are difficult to copy...
In fine, I hoped to have all the old HOWTOs reviewed for the end of
2009, it'not to be done if we don't do something.
Sincerely
jdd
