CMS discussions yet again

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 11:51 -0500, David Nalley wrote:
> Sparks, jsmith and I were talking in IRC and I thought the
> conversation should have a bit wider audience.
> 
> I think that while kbase and housing documentation for packaging
> guidelines and legal are excellent use cases for a CMS, I wonder if by
> trying to use it for everything we are not trying to use a hammer to
> drive a screw. My reason for saying that is that it seems like we are
> trying to push all of our non-wiki documentation into the CMS, which
> at least from my perspectives means we, to one degree or another, are
> abandoning DocBook.
> 
> For our 'heavy' documents, such as Release Notes, User Guide, and
> Security Guide, I don't see an escape from DocBook - it provides a lot
> of advantages that just don't exist in a CMS.  It does have
> disadvantages to be sure, but I guess the question in my mind is with
> all of the talk of moving to a CMS are we really prepared to ditch
> DocBook and it's benefits? Or is the CMS a solution for things like
> Legal and Packaging Guidelines, and potentially a knowledgebase, and
> not more?
> 
> Thoughts, Comments, Flames?
> 

I have yet to make any significant contributions to the Docs project, so
please take all of this with a $unit of $seasoning.

First off, though Karsten did give us a great description of what he
envisions the ideal solution for a CMS to be, someone like me (a
beginner) is not entirely sure of the scope of such a project.  What
does the Docs project cover?  For example, does the content on the Wiki
fall under the Docs project?  The Red Hat website has some awesome
documentation (specifically the guides for BIND & Fedora Directory
Server, which I've referred to frequently) - does that have anything to
do with the Fedora docs project, given that a lot of it overlaps with
what we may want to do or use?

Or, perhaps, is the CMS idea also intended to help wrangle all of these
disparate ideas really make the docs project more clear?  Sorry for the
n00bieness of this.

Having said that, I have observed that DocBook is a great format that
has nearly limitless uses.  Its strength definitely lies in producing
"documents".  I think "documents" tends to encompass things that you
could put, say, into a PDF or other single file format for publication &
distribution.  It would also be great for formatting into those nice
little documentation-as-website pages you find online (Red Hat has some
great examples under "Manuals").  However, the Fedora Docs project seems
to have gone a little past just "documents".  For example the kbase idea
does not, in my head, fit under something that can be a "document", and
so I think that, perhaps, DocBook doesn't make sense there.  So here
DocBook seems to not be an ideal catch-all, but good for a subset of
what's needed.

So, is it asking a lot to delineate precisely what are the things the
Docs project does/produces, so that maybe we - or, at the very least, I
- can, collectively (or solitarily) understand that maybe we use this
tool/process for that, and that tool/process for this?

Sorry if my reply doesn't actually help, but I am genuinely interested
in all of the above.

My RM0.02 (local currency).
 
________________________________________________________________________

Basil Mohamed Gohar
abu_hurayrah at hidayahonline.org
www.basilgohar.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/attachments/20090128/4466ec61/attachment.sig>