discuss: Thread: Some ideas for TLDP

Le 09/01/2016 19:20, J. S. Evans a écrit :

> wrong, but the problem with TLDP is that it lost all of it's inertia a few
> years ago and nobody is doing the cheerleading required to get people excited
> about the project.

I tried this during some years, but with no real success, and when I 
topped, nobody step on to take the place...

it's not only the LDP, making applications seems to be more interesting 
than document them.

15 years ago the Linux problem was lack of documentation, now we have 
too much, but of too low quality.

translation programs have the same fate; traduc.org, the french one, is 
nearly dead also.

Linux go ahead with a high pace, it's very difficult to follow the flow.

If somebody want to try, so good :-)

jdd

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 7:18 PM, J. S. Evans ####@####.#### wrote:

> Where is TLDP today?

Hi :-)

I am the only person left in the team.

> [...]

> why not find a better standard?

I started to investigate it some time ago and identified some possible
formats, with asciidoc as the most promising candidate.

> - Find a way to grow enthusiasm for the project. Looking at the stats for the
> existing mailing lists, it looks like most of them haven't had any new traffic
> in years.  Some going back to 2008 and before. TLDP is an amazing idea, why
> aren't we utilizing it for it's maximum value?

LDP has been started in times when publishing on internet was a
privilege for few. Now everyone can do it and do it for free.
Documentation started to fragment across programming languages, which
developed their own documentation flows, and geographically as well.
Docbook as a very powerful documentation language is hard to learn for
beginners.

> - Articles, books, guides, etc that are > 5 years old from the present should
> be put into an archives section of the site, but never ever deleted.  Who
> knows when some poor slob really will need to use a 3-button serial mouse?
> Information is always needed, but it doesn't need to be on the front page.

Yeah, cleaning up is needed, but there no clear rules for that were developed.

> - Replace pluckerDB with epub.  It just makes sense.

Definitely, it is mandatory to replace them.

> What I love about TLDP is the same as what I love about Linux, the GPL, and
> free software. I love the fact that there are no ads.  Never change that.  The
> site is smooth and easy to navigate. Mostly what I propose is to see more
> content and make it easier for that content to be added.

Definitely, and now we have identify how we can convince authors to
publish at LDP again.

> The scripts would still need to be updated.

Definitely, the publishing chain is now defunct with departure of its
author, Greg. We need to make it again, utilising web-hooks given by
github. There are also fully static pages generators like for example
pelican, which can be very useful to make a clear and unified look for
all documentation, easy handled by mirrors. I started to investigate
it, but working alone is not a big pleasure and it goes very slowly.

> TLDP is that it lost all of it's inertia a few years ago and nobody
> is doing the cheerleading required to get people excited
> about the project.

That's absolutely true, we need such person. Nobody arrived up to date.

Everything now is github, and I will be more than happy if you decide
to join the team.

S.

Quoting Serge Victor ####@####.####

> I am the only person left in the team.

Pleased to meet you, Serge.

> Everything now is github, and I will be more than happy if you decide
> to join the team.

At some point soon, I am going to want to submit updates to my TLDP 
documents.  I hope I will be able to do so without needing a login 
on the proprietary GitHub service:  To date, I have not yet signed up
for an account with that company.  

It would be great if I could just send the new version some other way.

Are you really on La Réunion, by the way (.re TLD)?

-- 
Cheers,                      He's making a database;
Rick Moen                    He's sorting it twice.
####@####.####          SELECT * from contacts WHERE behavior = 'nice';
McQ! (4x80)                  SQL Clause is coming to town.      -- @KarenMN 

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Rick Moen ####@####.#### wrote:
> Quoting Serge Victor ####@####.####

Hi Rick.

>> Everything now is github, and I will be more than happy if you decide
>> to join the team.
>
> At some point soon, I am going to want to submit updates to my TLDP
> documents.  I hope I will be able to do so without needing a login
> on the proprietary GitHub service:  To date, I have not yet signed up
> for an account with that company.

I don't think it's an issue, as git itself is free, we can leave
github at any moment without loosing any data. Proprietary is only the
authorisation service, which is not essential for functioning of the
LDP and can be substituted in few hours if needed.

> It would be great if I could just send the new version some other way.

You can send it to github yourself or ask a friend for a favour :-)
When did you update your document last time?

S.

Quoting Serge Victor ####@####.####

> You can send it to github yourself or ask a friend for a favour :-)
> When did you update your document last time?

One of them on 2013-07-25, the other on 2005-01-18.  Both by sending
source to ####@####.####

Perhaps upon my revising the former of those, I can just mail it to you
-- or perhsps ####@####.#### is still a valid address?

Just in case you ever are interested in a GitHub workalike that's open
source and suitable for both small and medium-sized communities, I can 
strongly recommend GitLab Community Edition, which my firm has used for
a few years in conjuction with Puppet and Jenkins to do configuration
management and autobuilding.  (I expect I'll be deploying a GitLab
instance of my own, on my home LAN, after my next site rebuild.)

(So, I'm guessing you are not, actually a resident of La Réunion. 
I actually was curious about that, you know.)

the ldp wiki is marginally active

http://wiki.tldp.org/RecentChanges

and wiki pages can be converted to docbook

https://moinmo.in/DocBook

I don't ow what is the docbook version used, some years ago the 
conversion almost workd:

http://wiki.tldp.org/Exporting_to_docbook

jdd

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 4:47 PM, Rick Moen ####@####.#### wrote:
> Quoting Serge Victor ####@####.####
>
>> You can send it to github yourself or ask a friend for a favour :-)
>> When did you update your document last time?
>
> Perhaps upon my revising the former of those, I can just mail it to you
> -- or perhsps ####@####.#### is still a valid address?

Unfortunately, no :-( It's not valid anymore, I will put an
autoresponder there soon with some informative message.

LDP is not able to provide email to github gateway at the moment,
until someone volunteers of course.

> Just in case you ever are interested in a GitHub workalike that's open
> source and suitable for both small and medium-sized communities, I can
> strongly recommend GitLab Community Edition, which my firm has used for
> a few years in conjuction with Puppet and Jenkins to do configuration
> management and autobuilding.  (I expect I'll be deploying a GitLab
> instance of my own, on my home LAN, after my next site rebuild.)

It might be that github will be replaced by googs in future, but as I
stated before, I have no objections to use github's auth system, until
they use GPL git. If linux itself is maintained on github, it's more
than natural to keep linux documentation in the same place and get
some synergy.

> (So, I'm guessing you are not, actually a resident of La Réunion.
> I actually was curious about that, you know.)

Yes, I am located on the Random island Area51 north from Reunion.

cheers,
Serge

Quoting Serge Victor ####@####.####

> LDP is not able to provide email to github gateway at the moment,
> until someone volunteers of course.

I was hoping you would say someting like 'Sure, send new SGML to me and
I'll check it in.'  I certainly would use that only very rarely.

> It might be that github will be replaced by googs in future, but as I
> stated before, I have no objections to use github's auth system, until
> they use GPL git.

Naturally, I have no problem with your using GitHub, either.  Enjoy!  It
would merely be nice to continue being able to send TLDP updates.  If
you can suggest how best to do that other than 'sign up with GitHub', I
would be grateful to hear it.  Otherwise, I would guess my documentation
will henceforth not be updated except on my own Internet server.

Probably, when I complete my impending site rebuild, I'll create (once
again) a full TLDP mirror and update my documention there.  To which I
expect I would then offer public git access.

Because, you know, that's the sort of thing git is for.  No outsourcing
required.

> If linux itself is maintained on github...

As it turns out, that is not the case.

The Linux kernel is, of course, maintained by the various subsystem
maintainers in git (as that's what the toolset was invented for) -- but
it is not maintained on GitHub.  The primary maintainers learned their
lesson about outsourcing to captive-proprietary development and hosting
tools during the BitKeeper / Larry McVoy debacle.

> Yes, I am located on the Random island Area51 north from Reunion.

Droll.  ;->

On 09/01/16 12:18, J. S. Evans wrote:
> Some suggestions & talking points:
> 
> - Move away from DocBook 4 to something a little more modern and preferably 
> user friendly like LyX.

I agree that DocBook 4 isn't very user-friendly, but I'm not sure that
LyX is the right solution.

Markdown is very simple to use for beginners and can be converted into
various formats using pandoc:

http://pandoc.org/

I would be far more likely to contribute to TLDP documentation if I
could get stuck in writing things instead of having to work out how
DocBook and a complex build system go together.

-- 
Paul Waring
Freelance consultant
http://www.pwaring.com

On Út, 2016-01-12 at 17:00 +0000, Paul Waring wrote:
> On 09/01/16 12:18, J. S. Evans wrote:
> > Some suggestions & talking points:
> > 
> > - Move away from DocBook 4 to something a little more modern and
> > preferably 
> > user friendly like LyX.
> 
> I agree that DocBook 4 isn't very user-friendly, but I'm not sure
> that
> LyX is the right solution.

I only suggested LyX because it now handles DocBook natively without
needing extra plugins or converters. If we move away from it entirely,
I'd still use it and then use pandoc to convert it to whatever format
is chosen because I'm comfortable with it. 
> 
> Markdown is very simple to use for beginners and can be converted
> into
> various formats using pandoc:
> 
> http://pandoc.org/
> 
> I would be far more likely to contribute to TLDP documentation if I
> could get stuck in writing things instead of having to work out how
> DocBook and a complex build system go together.
>