Publican 3.1

[Jared K. Smith]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:43 PM, Ruediger Landmann
<r.landmann at redhat.com> wrote:
> Just a quick heads-up on Publican status. As some of you know, 3.1 has just
> gone GA, and I hope to have it packaged shortly.

Cool news, Rudi, glad to hear it :-)

> We have a couple of problems with the 3.x series on Fedora, and a couple of
> implications for Fedora docs on top of that.
>
> 1. The big issue is still wkhtmltopdf. This is finally packaged well enough
> to get it reviewed, so I hope to start that process shortly. In the
> meantime, however, I plan to have the Fedora package depend on FOP. Publican
> will, however, default to wkhtmltopdf where it is available. We should make
> therefore make wkhtmltopdf packages available for Fedora docs folk to use in
> the meantime.

I'm assuming you mean that you're make wkhtmltopdf packages available
outside of the Fedora repos.  I hate to have people in Fedora
dependent on tools that aren't inside the Fedora repos yet, so
hopefully we can get official packages in Fedora sooner rather than
later.  (I say that knowing full well that there are some serious
packaging gotchas in wkhtmltopdf.)

> 2. A bug has emerged on F18 in some of the XSL we use; this worked fine up
> to now, and so it looks like a change in a dependency. We haven't isolated
> the issue, but the workaround is simple and I'll include a patch in the
> version we ship.

Details?

> 3. A while back, we overhauled the text of the Fedora brand; I have only
> recently made this available for translation and will point translators to
> it.

Interesting -- any more details on what has changed?

> 4. When Publican 3 gets into the repos, we will either need to convert the
> existing docs site structure to the new Publican 3 structure, or force all
> writers and translators to stay on 2.8. Obviously, the former is preferable,
> but will require a freeze on publication while this happens (should
> hopefully be no more than a few hours)

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with putting in a short freeze
on publication and converting the docs site structure to the new
Publican 3 structure, as long as we're confident that the doc authors
can use Publican 3 and not see too many changes to their workflow.
Care to comment on what differences a document author might see when
moving from say version 2.8 to version 3.1?

--
Jared Smith