Proposed road map for ubuntu-docs

[Hannie Dumoleyn]

Hello Gunnar,
Before I give any comment, I will begin by diving into this matter. I 
have just installed Ubuntu Gnome Zesty in VirtualBox, so I can clearly 
see the differences with Unity 7.
Your proposal is more of a technical thing. I have no experience with 
forking, packaging, structure, mallard etc. I have to read the 
ubuntu-docs documentation to get acquainted with it (Time, or lack of it 
:)). I will also have a close look at bugs 1686726 (thanks Jeremy) and 
1686267. It is a bit of abacadabra for me at this moment ):

I do have experience with translations (pot and po) and merging files, 
though. As a translator for Gnome I am currently working on the 
gnome-user-docs [1]. As you can see, my collegue first merged 
ubuntu-help with gnome-help (samengevoegd=merged).

I was just wondering, if Ubuntu is going to use the Gnome environment, 
wouldn't the gnome-help be sufficient?

[1] https://l10n.gnome.org/vertimus/gnome-user-docs/master/gnome-help/nl

Hannie

Op 27-04-17 om 16:45 schreef Gunnar Hjalmarsson:
> After Jeremy raised the question about which package to use for the 
> Ubuntu documentation, we have had some discussion off-list, which 
> ended up in <https://launchpad.net/bugs/1686267>. So I'd say that the 
> working hypothesis, at least for now, is that we'll keep ubuntu-docs.
>
> Now, the name of the package is not really the most important aspect. 
> But the ubuntu-docs Bazaar branch is a handy tool, where all the docs 
> pages reside, and from which we up to now have built both the 
> ubuntu-docs package which is installed locally and the HTML version 
> which is published at help.ubuntu.com. My hope is that we won't 
> unnecessarily change that workflow.
>
> So, what will be new? Most of the ubuntu-docs pages already origin 
> from GNOME Help. This will obviously be even more true in Ubuntu 
> 17.10, and the need for Ubuntu specific customization will be 
> significantly reduced. The Unity specific pages will simply be dropped.
>
> My idea is to fork the applicable version of the GNOME Help .page 
> files, and as a first step replace the current pages in ubuntu-docs 
> with the GNOME Help pages. That will give us this initial structure:
>
> https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.24/
>
> Then we should identify which of the current Ubuntu specific pages 
> that make sense to keep, and make the necessary changes to integrate 
> those pages into the structure.
>
> Since the upstream GNOME Help pages will make up most of ubuntu-docs, 
> and the GNOME desktop environment tend to change faster than what has 
> been the case with Unity 7 in the past few cycles, it's important that 
> we don't make it difficult to update to new page versions by forking 
> again. This means that we should avoid to make Ubuntu adjustments to 
> the GNOME pages. Instead, if we identify room for improvements, we 
> should at first hand work with the GNOME folks and propose upstream 
> changes.
>
> As regards translations, at this time I think it makes sense to keep 
> the Launchpad interface (the ubuntu-help translation domain). The 
> GNOME Help pages have been translated upstream, and my intention is to 
> try to somehow import those translations to Launchpad, so the 
> translators don't need to redo the work. This will probably need some 
> manual fiddling - can't tell exactly how at the moment.
>
> What do you all think? Does this sound as a sensible synopsis of a 
> road map?
>