Re: why hide the docs?

|--==> tim hall writes:

  th> Last Thursday 25 November 2004 19:23, Damien Cirotteau was like:
  >>Any volonteer to manage such a project?

  th> I'd love to, but seriously don't have time at the moment. Could we create 
a 
  th> page or two on alioth to work stuff up?

Dear all,

the documentation issue  is a  rather  important one, and at  the same
time is one of the hardest as it primary needs wide collaboration.

This a wide topic. My medium/long term wishes would be:

1) Carefully examine what the Debian policy says about documentation,
   find its current drawbacks and figure out what shall be done to
   improve the situation

2) Create an official Debian subproject [0] called Debian Multimedia [1],
   which shall deal with the quality of audio/multimedia applications in
   Debian, and in particular takes care that packages are well documented,
   with respect to 1)

Well, this would be the ideal world, and we all know about it..

In the real, hic et nunc, world I'd suggest to create a new demudi-doc
package in the Alioth repository [2].

We could  use such package as a  temporary workaround to  supply extra
documentation, whenever Debian  lacks it,  and   to make  the  already
available documentation (typically in /usr/share/doc/<package>) easier
to access.

A rough  idea which comes to  my mind right  now is to have demudi-doc
automatically  create  an html  index  with the  same structure as the
application menu and whose entries point to /usr/share/doc/<package>.


Cheers,

Free

[0] see the Projects section at http://www.debian.org/devel/
[1] currently only a mailing list exists
[2] http://demudi.alioth.debian.org/browser/