Hi! Sorry for being absent from most of the conversation, and not getting my latest release of dwww out... - I was working in Vancouver last week, came back, got sick, one of my main modems burnt out (lightning?), I replaced it, upgraded my server, messed up PPP, didn't configure the modem correctly, clients calling me up giving me more work, etc, etc, etc... - so I'm way behind schedule on dwww.
Here's my ideas for the documentation stuff:
1) a web server, dwww, etc. should be optional - not a core part
of the system. I hope to fix up dwww so that it is much faster,
powerful, nice, etc. - but the HTML documentation should be
browseable without having all this stuff installed.
dwww is meant to integrate the existing documentation formats
for convenience, but not replace all of them.
2) All the documentation should be viewable via HTML if dwww is
installed - but it shouldn't be necessary to have HTML versions
of something that is already in info or man format. If there is an
HTML version that looks better, by all means include it (if
it's small, put it in the same package, otherwise use a
separate package).
3) I'd recommend using something like Debiandoc-SGML for documentation
written directly for Debian. But this should be optional. I like
it because it will work nicely with dwww (and without), plus it is
fairly consistent, and can be converted to multiple formats. We
discussed some nice enhancements for it on the debian-doc mailing
list which should work quite nicely.
Oh yeah, we still need separate /usr/doc/<package>/README files,
and man pages too... HTML shouldn't be used to replace these.
HTML shouldn't be used to replace info files shipped with GNU
software either.
4) HTML documentation, if it exists, should be gzipped. Lynx and
Netscape can handle the compressed files, provided that the links
are straightened out using a tool like fixhrefgz. I was going to
stick that tool into a "dwww-dev" package + possibly some other
ones. (I've got a few Debian installations on 386's and 486's
with less than 150MB of disk total) - I'm going to experiment
with straightening out the jdk1.1 documentation...
e2compr isn't really an option, in my opinion, since it restricts
the portability of the entire system.
5) It would be nice if Diety could install just documentation, or
just the binaries, and no documentation.
6) dwww will let us serve documentation directly off of an external
site, so it would be nice to have a way of installing the packages
with no documentation at all.
7) Cacheing - I'm going to split the cacheing in dwww into a separate
package. That way, it should be easy to improve it, not use it,
or use something like squid instead.
That's it for now...
Cheers,
- Jim
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