discuss: Formats
Subject:
Re: Formats
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
1 Mar 2016 06:04:36 +0000
Message-Id: <20160301060359.GA9182@daveslinux>
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:21:06PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting David Lawyer ####@####.####
>
> > Should LDP accept all formats? No.
>
> Hold that thought for a moment.
>
> > First of all, a doc needs to contain the authors name, email (perhaps
> > scrambled), and date of revision and a perhaps a note as to whether or
> > not the revision is minor.
>
> So, if a good submission arrived in, say, plaintext or HTML that lacked
> those elements, we volunteers would say something like 'Terrific
> contribution, and thank you! By the way, what's the author's name, date
> of revision, and by the way is the revision minor?' Right? I think the
> answer to that question is 'yes'. So, in effect, that submission would
> be gratefully received and we-all would add the missing elements as
> prompted from the submitter.
LDP would simply tell authors to put their name, the date, etc. at the
start of the doc, or it would be provided by a template (like for emails
or for the how-to generator that's still on the web). Why would someone
refuse to do that? It's so easy to do. Of course an article needs a
title also. There are always some exceptional cases that don't need to be
considered in advance (unless they would do significant harm to LDP).
>
> (My recollection is that LDP also learned from past neglect about
> explicit licensing terms, and would politely pursue the submitter to
> secure a grant of some forkable-permissions licensing terms from the
> copyright holder before merging the doc into LDP's collection. Correct
> me if I'm wrong, please.)
Yes we need to revise the manifesto on that point, and I'll post here my
proposals. Licensing conditions were removed from the wiki manifesto and
perhaps they should be put back. We really need a CMS where the data on
licenses could be placed. We already have such data but it's not in an
integrated cms.
> BTW, I will conditionally volunteer to help convert into reasonable
> formats promising submissions arriving in strange format.
> ('Conditionally' means I reserve the right to say I'm busy or otherwise
> unavailable at particular times, and of course there are many strange
> formats I cannot parse, and possibly some for which I'd turn out to lack
> time and patience.)
What about volunteering to do something that has a higher priority than
some cases of conversion,like seeing if Plone would make a good cms for
LDP and how to implment it?
>
> So, functionally speaking, I'd suggest that no format is an automatic
> deal-breaker, and it's not in LDP's interest to so suggest.
It depends on whether or not the doc can be easily converted to html or plain
text. LDP has priorities. For example the publisher O'Reilly offered us
the 2nd edition of its Network book and there was no one on the discuss
list to accept it. David Merrill's work on a CMS data base using Plone
for LDP went to waste since no one took over when he dropped out due to
serious illness (aids). And what about maintaining our website (and
mirrors)? And recruiting new people?
If it's going to take any significant amount of time to convert to other
formats, I think we can only accept it if someone can be found to convert
it. Of course, the effort to devote to such conversions depends on the
quality of the doc and the need for it. We need to have a list of formats
that we can convert automatically (and perhaps another list of formats we
can easily convert but not fully automatically). In some cases we would
need to let the author know that we just don't have the resources to do
the conversion.
In some cases people have taken over an out-of-date HOWTO in linuxdoc and
converted it to docbook. And I worry that LDP may have destroyed the
linuxdoc version. Are the old version from cvs all in git-hub? There are
many cases where a HOWTO is taken over by a new author and in that case
the new author wants the doc to be in a format that is easy for him/her to
deal with.
David Lawyer
