Regarding: faq.xml.qna issues

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On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 09:34:21PM +0200, Michèle Garoche wrote:
> Le 27 avr. 2005 à 21:04, Sean Wheller a écrit :
> >On Wednesday 27 April 2005 21:13, David Malcolm wrote:
> >>>Question, do we want FAQ in the user manual? It is not customary at
> >>>GNOME.
> The problem I reported was that first the help menu does not work on  
> Mac, not related to conglomerate, but to the gnome help which has  
> hard-coded the path, hence there is no possibility to access the  
> files. Second that nobody knows that there is a faq, hence there is  
> no chance that the user sees it. That's why I suggested to  
> incorporate it in the faq and supplied a working patch for it, which  
> was rejected for reasons I cannot understand. Then a new not working  
> patch was supplied and accepted for reasons I cannot understand either.
> 
> So that now the faq is still outside of the manual, which was not the  
> goal and did not compile since it relies on a local stylesheet.
> 
> So that now I cannot even compile conglomerate, unless I supply  
> another patch, will will presumably also be rejected, etc.
> 
> Feel like I don't have fun to work like this. Even less be flamed by  
> people who did not even try the patches, before rejected them.


I see in the above posting more then just a technical problem.

This E-mail is about how I see it.

Where I'm aware the I can express myself somethings really clumsy,
I take the risc to do again. No bad intensions. Just realizing that
I could be part of the problem and wanna be part of the solution.


The doc directory is an old wound, it still does pain.
In the very early days of Conglomerate there was some content in it.
Sean did rewrite it. I didn't accepted the tarball he delivered,
I insisted on "show what you have changed" and wanted a unified diff.
Dave did included the tarball, the whole content of the doc directory
was completely changed,  [1]. The new _user_ manual got build
instructions, that is something that doesn't belong there. The document
is licensed under GFDL. It was shortly after the newyearsday colission.
I was disappointed. I never touched the doc directory, nobody did, nobody
cared.

Then Michele came up with a patch on the doc directory. Having learned
from previous mistakes, I choose the really harsh way and did not
respond[2]. The patch was AFAICT never rejected, but completely ignored.

Next came a workaround on yelp not being able the handle QandA.
The original faq.xml became faq.xml.qna. faq.xml is generated from
faq.xml.qna, so there was a faq.xml available for yelp. ( the XSL
transformation from faq.xml.qna into faq.xml changes the QandA that yelp
doesn't handle )  http://www.conglomerate.org/faq.html is also generated
from faq.xml.qna.  Credits go to Jeff Martin. 

Now we have the report that the manual from the doc directory is not
available on all systems. That can happen, nobody has all systems.
Luckly the report came and we saw response on it. That didn't fix the
problem, but nobody was left alone in the dark.



What I am trying to say is that when things go the wrong way,
then spent more words on it.

> 
> Cheers,
> Michèle
> <http://micmacfr.homeunix.org>


Cheers
Geert Stappers


[1] raped, demolist. (I can't express, english is not my native language)
[2] http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/conglomerate-devel/2004-August/003065.html

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