Now that I’ve finished drafting some for-pay work I’ve been writing, I can move on to the Documentation Guide, which has become woefully outdated against our actual real-world processes. With some additional concerns about licensing and CVS i18n restructuring, just to name a few, it will be an interesting effort. Looks like letting the smoke clear WRT the former issue is going to involve ripping out the style guidelines, which are mostly derived from the GFDL-licensed material by the GNOME Foundation. That’s OK by me, because I don’t think we ever got resolved to our satisfaction a clear answer on how best to comply with the licensing requirements. Replacing them, though, will be difficult; this is why so many publishing groups rely on external style manuals as canon.
I spent a little more time cleaning up some Docs Project work on packaging, and wrote a couple of wiki pages summarizing how current doc maintainers can get their work into the proper format. Unfortunately we can’t automate the entire process of converstion from embedded <articleinfo> elements to external rpm-info.xml files, but we can make it a little less painful. Once translators fill in the titles and descriptions for the i18n’d sections in these rpm-info.xml files, and the new Makefile.common is complete, it’s off to the races.
It’s a docs revolution!