discuss: Thread: licensing/forkability; active work; git/cvs history; CMS; was [Re: Formats]

Hello there David (et alia),

There seemed to be an awful lot of stuff in this one email, so I 
changed the subject line and rearranged the ordering a bit, because 
there were several threads that you interleaved in your message to 
the list.


Licensing and forkability
-------------------------
>>[Rick]
>> (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.  

Given the perennial questions around licensing and forkability of
documents, I think this is important work for us.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with, David.


Content management system (CMS)
-------------------------------
>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.

>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?  

This lack of a CMS is something that we have felt for probably, at
least 5000 days.

This problem is on my mental radar, but I have been choosing to
focus on the automation problem and resumption of routine
acceptance of documents first.

If somebody wishes to volunteer to handle a CMS or coordination
tool, I think we would welcome that.

>David Merrill's work on a CMS data base using Plone for LDP went
>to waste

It is still available (thanks to Serge, I think):

  https://github.com/tLDP/lampadas

If there is a volunteer who is interested in plone/lampadas, then,
maybe we can get some action here.  See also below...


Supported document formats
--------------------------
>>[Rick]
>> 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.)

Thank you, Rick.  I feel the same way.  I will conditionally
volunteer to help convert documents from promising submissions
into viable accepted formats.

>We need to have a list of formats that we can convert
>automatically

Well, I can report that we have that now.  I have included that
and will continue to include that in the python-tldp tools.  (Yes,
this should be on our overhauled website, too.)

>(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.  

Yes, agreed.  Case-by-case basis works for me.  And, at least, we
know that both I and Rick Moen are available to be called upon for
conversion from 'weird' formats.  As long as they are not too
weird!


Second edition of a network book
--------------------------------
>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.  

How long ago was that, David?

If the offer still stands, I'd be willing to wrangle anything that
needed to be wrangled on our end.


Current and future work
-----------------------
>And what about maintaining our website (and mirrors)?  And
>recruiting new people?  

Here's the active current work (that I know of):

  * Serge is figuring out a new (to him) VPS management and
    provisioning stack in preparation for a new mailing list node
    and a new document production node.

  * I am figuring out how to automate publication of our existing
    collection and adding support for a few more recent
    documentation formats.

  * We will coordinate (at least partly visible here, too, I'm
    sure) and spin up the new services at some point.

Work that would follow after this (less well-scoped and
understood):

  * resume routine acceptance of documents

  * extract metadata from document collection and produce
    HOWTO-INDEX

  * overhaul website: content review, flow, look?

  * figure out some sort of content management system (CMS) which
    addresses our coordination needs (we should not forget the
    unused resource we have in the wiki that jdd labored over
    several years ago)


Version control history question
--------------------------------
>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.

I will address your main question, which seems to be:

  Are the old version from cvs all in git-hub?

Yes.

Yes, the whole CVS history is there.  I suspect that Serge
imported the entire CVS repository along with its entire history.
That's very important stuff when one needs to go on an
archeological expedition.  (I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that
Serge migrated the VCS to GitHub...)

Anyway, regardless of who accomplished the task, the history is
there.  To try to allay any concerns you may have about data loss,
I can confirm that I was able to check out the state of the TLDP
repository as of Nov 5, 2002 and poke around at the files.

If you wish to browse the repository history, you can do it here
(pointing to the history of the howto/linuxdoc directory, for
example):

  https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/commits/master/LDP/howto/linuxdoc

And, here's a commit from Nov 6, 2002:

  https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/commit/ddc3dc2e4458fc54e514b82850ce6d8fd1a4c858#diff-6f6b2b22a70df164b2e6416d81608c10

Is there any particular document you were worried about?

-Martin

-- 
Martin A. Brown