Fedora Xfce documentation

[Nathan Thomas]

On 20/01/11 20:49, Brock Hudson wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:15:20 +0000
> Nathan Thomas<nathan.thomas at peacenik.co.uk>  wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Brock's email thread about DVD installation media kind of branched
>> into a sub-thread about Fedora Xfce documentation. I just wanted to
>> point out that we already have some documentation of the Xfce desktop
>> and applications included in the Xfce Spin in the Fedora User Guide
>> (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/User_Guide/index.html),
>> almost as much as we have for GNOME and KDE, in fact.
>>
>> I'll be trying to update this material for Xfce 4.8 in time for
>> Fedora 15. Brock mentioned that he would like to write an
>> introductory guide for Xfce in Fedora, which would be great - it
>> would presumably be more substantial than existing documentation, and
>> it would be nice to have all the Xfce documentation collected in one
>> place rather than mixed in with GNOME and KDE stuff, as it is at the
>> moment. However, I'm concerned about duplication of effort. Should we
>> simply remove the Xfce material from the User Guide and point people
>> towards the new introductory guide? Or is there sufficient reason to
>> keep some Xfce documentation in the User Guide?
>>
>> I would strongly recommend making the new guide part of the Fedora
>> Docs Project, so it can join the central online repository for Fedora
>> documentation (http://docs.fedoraproject.org), and be easily
>> translated by the Localisation teams using Transifex. See
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_Docs_Project for more info -
>> documentation is marked up using Docbook XML and managed with the
>> awesome Publican toolchain, but if you'd prefer to use the wiki or
>> even just plain text for the introductory guide I'd be happy to do
>> the XML/git/Publican bits.
>>
>> Best wishes
>> Nathan
>>
>>
> Sorry for the tangent my email took : ). I think we should include the
> technical references for Xfce within Fedora-docs and user guides in
> wiki. IMHO we should separate what we can from the other docs for gnome
> and kde because our documentation tends to get over looked because the
> other desktops eclipse xfce. If a user has a problem they have to pour
> over gnome documentation before ever reading anything relevant to their
> search, and I'd like to clean it up and make it a one stop shop for a
> reader. Have it clean cut if you will where technical references like
> libs and etc are stored in fedora docs and for the average end-user the
> wiki will serve its purpose explaining xfce's features.
We don't actually document more technical aspects such as libraries etc 
for any desktop - we just have practical 'how-to'-style guides aimed at 
general users, and one or two guides aimed at specific user groups (e.g. 
the Deployment Guide and Virtualisation Guide are aimed more at system 
admins). Major technical changes from the previous Fedora release are 
documented in the Release Notes.
>> I would strongly recommend making the new guide part of the Fedora
>> Docs Project, so it can join the central online repository for Fedora
>> documentation (http://docs.fedoraproject.org), and be easily
>> translated by the Localisation teams using Transifex.
> I do like this idea Nathan, and perhaps we should include end user
> guides in both the wiki and proper documentation. It may seem redundant
> but we can read through what we have in wiki and decide what makes it
> into the official docs for future release, use the wiki as a guide-book
> "testing ground." This will also allow us to pick and choose
> documentation for future releases.
Sounds good to me!

Not everyone who uses Fedora has easy, unlimited to access to the 
internet, so at some point we need to get the new Xfce guide available 
in some downloadable form. But the wiki is definitely a good place to 
develop the guide.

Nathan