Re: CMS discussions yet again

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:51:29AM -0500, David Nalley wrote:
>  Sparks, jsmith and I were talking in IRC and I thought the
>  conversation should have a bit wider audience.
>  
>  I think that while kbase and housing documentation for packaging
>  guidelines and legal are excellent use cases for a CMS, I wonder if by
>  trying to use it for everything we are not trying to use a hammer to
>  drive a screw. My reason for saying that is that it seems like we are
>  trying to push all of our non-wiki documentation into the CMS, which
>  at least from my perspectives means we, to one degree or another, are
>  abandoning DocBook.
>  
>  For our 'heavy' documents, such as Release Notes, User Guide, and
>  Security Guide, I don't see an escape from DocBook - it provides a lot
>  of advantages that just don't exist in a CMS.  It does have
>  disadvantages to be sure, but I guess the question in my mind is with
>  all of the talk of moving to a CMS are we really prepared to ditch
>  DocBook and it's benefits? Or is the CMS a solution for things like
>  Legal and Packaging Guidelines, and potentially a knowledgebase, and
>  not more?
>  
>  Thoughts, Comments, Flames? 
I think all of this was answered in my responses to other threads.

We have to consider a document as coming from an upstream.  The team
working on the document can choose from a wide variety of content
solutions -- 

* fp.org/wiki
* fhosted.org/$foo/wiki
* fhosted.org/$foo/$xml
* docs.fp.org/$cms (they will, you know they will)

To some degree, this Docs Project team needs to think of itself as
packagers.  Some content we package we produce ourselves; some we get
from upstreams.  Where we control the full lifecycle, we make certain
choices.  Where we cannot control the full lifecycle, we take what we
get and do what we need to it.

We 100% should have a consistent, best-practice, preferred, and
documented set of tools and process to take ideas to published.

We also need to accomodate the many places content is coming from and
not expect that we can enforce (all of) our styles on them.

There is a balance in here; from experience we can know "All
DocBook XML following this specific standard in our single version
control system" does not scale to support something the size of the
Fedora Project, much less just Fedora Linux.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
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