XFce 4 user guide

Jasper Huijsmans jasper at moongroup.com
Tue May 6 20:37:16 CEST 2003


Ok, new try.

I partly changed my mind on this. I also talked to botsie about it a
bit on IRC. There are several things to consider:

+ although technically all modules are separate we want to present XFce
  4 as a coherent desktop environment to the user.

+ the docs work better if we can point people to 'The Manual'. Proper
  listing of available docs or maybe (better?) even automatic indexing
  could solve this.

+ keeping docs together with a module makes it easier to provide updates
  when the module updates, plus when someone uses only one module (say
  xfwm4 for ROX or GNOME) they'd still get the full documentation.

So eventually I thing the original approach we took was not too bad, but
I'd like to define it a bit better. 

1) User Guide
Now part of xfce-utils. Could be separate, or not. Instead of a really
simple overview it is now I'd like to enlarge its scope a bit to be an
extensive overview of the default XFce 4 installation -- the environment
you get when running 'startxfce4'.

Should describe the general working of the panel, xfdesktop, xfwm, the
settings manager and the taskbar.

2) Module docs
Rather short docs, more in man-page or how-to style, shortly describing
what its function is, how to run it and how to customize it.

I've been trying to get this right, but it is harder than I though. Any
help or ideas will be much appreciated.

It still might be good to have all documentation in one module though,
to take advantage of a common build system. It should be possible to
package them separately anyway.

I'd like to change the documentation directory structure a bit to better
deal with translations. I want to have this general structure:

 ${datadir}/xfce4/doc/<module>/<ll>/

where <ll> is the language code, or C for the default. 

The <module> part could be left out, but then more care must be taken
with naming the files.

What do you think? 

On Sun, 4 May 2003 12:58:36 +0200
Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at moongroup.com> wrote:
...
> 
> http://members.home.nl/jbhuijsmans/xfce4-user-guide/
> 

I do still like the style I used here ;-)

	Jasper



More information about the Xfce4-dev mailing list