discuss: [tfox@redhat.com: HOWTO doc's in 7.3]
Subject:
Re: [tfox@redhat.com: HOWTO doc's in 7.3]
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
11 May 2002 20:24:10 -0000
Message-Id: <20020511132355.A281@lafn.org>
On Sat, May 11, 2002 at 01:30:52PM -0500, ####@####.#### wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 11 May 2002, David Lawyer wrote:
> >Since we've lost RedHat as a distributor of our HOWTOs, and since Debian
> >is irrationally splitting them,
>
>
> what is debian doing?
Debian plans to divide our HOWTOs into "free" and "non-free". The main
package list only includes the "free" ones so people that want to
download all the HOWTOs will need to download two packages, each from a
different package list.
> what happened to red hat?
They decided to remove LDP HOWTOs from their documentation CD due to
complaints about errors, stale docs, and bad format. I think by bad
format they mean cases where someone forgot some tags but it got
converted to html in spite of the missing tags.
An example is a mistake I made using LinuxDoc when I forgot to put a <p>
tag to start the first paragraph after a section title. Here's an
example:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
<sect> Configuration File
By editing the configuration file in ... (plus the rest of the text)
<sect1> Configuring the Speed
<p>If the speed is set too high, the ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
In the above case, the table of contents will contain:
3. Configuration File By editing the configuration file in ... (plus
the rest of the text)
3.1 Configuring the Speed
3.2 ...
Since the <p> was omitted, the sgml converter thinks that the whole
section (until the next <sect1> tag) is part of the section title. So
the table of contents contains paragraphs of text which are missing from
the body of the document. Very confusing to the reader, but it's still
usable if the reader can make sense of it.
David Lawyer
