[Xfce-i18n] Documentation wiki on docs.xfce.org

[Nick Schermer]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 1:27 AM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:

> Some people may disagree with the following statement but many people
> have written useful instructions related to Xfce all over the web, so
> maybe those are worth more than a half-executed "proper docs" attempt.

I prefer a bit of control over the English core docs, and possibly
also some maintainers of packagers.

> What I'm trying to say is that maybe a publicly writable wiki would be
> ok as well, with guidelines and a few people watching over the whole
> thing. Yes, wiki is not the ideal format for docs (e.g. less
> custom-tailored and user-friendly-searchable than a Mallard database)
> but---I agree with Nick here---it's probably much better than (almost)
> nothing at all.

Docbook is very powerful, but mallard is also a stripped version of
html, I don't think it has much we'd miss in a wiki.

The HTML pages we ship atm are not searchable too, so that would be an
improvement as well.

> An idea that I just proposed on IRC is to have a global xfconf key that
> specifies the base URL for documentation lookup. So if there was a
> function in libxfce4ui to open a docs topic, it could use this key and
> distributions could decide on their own whether to create an offline
> docs package and change the key to use that or not.

If we want this solely for distributions, we can also make this a
compile flag. I'd prefer this over a config key, since it is easier
for packagers and also for us (as I pointed out 4ui does not link to
xfconf too, but useless to make that connection for something like
this).

> I'm not sure we need the /xfce, /apps separation in this case. Do we
> ever have name clashes? And maybe it should
> be /C/<appname>, /fr/<appname> etc. rather than having one toplevel dir
> for English and subdirectories for the different locales, which feels a
> bit "asymmetric".

As Mike pointed out that is not how the translations plugin works, so
/C/ is not a wise idea. I'd prefer to "separate" the core docs from
plugins/apps for readability  and permissions. So a bit of grouping is
preferred.

Nick