Battery on laptop is dying, so I will keep this quick.
On May 21, 2008, at 6:43 AM, osimons wrote:
>
> On May 20, 1:02 pm, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> nomine.org> wrote:
>> -On [20080520 03:02], Noah Kantrowitz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>>
>> So trunk/doc will move to the newhelp branch?
>> Just need to know before I start editing the files.
>>
>
> Yes, it will. As Noah is on the road atm, we just need to decide on
> how to move/remove. Ideally I would see that instead of adding them as
> new files, we moved them from wiki/default-pages whereever possible to
> preserve the history they actually represent. That likely means just
> deleting them in trunk, merging that change to newhelp, and then start
> creating the new structure and copy in the already converted text.
>
> However, there are some other related issues, and I've written a few
> words on this below... :-)
>
> Basic structure
> ---------------
>
> As more or less agreed above, we make 4 main guides:
>
> - Install Guide
> - Developer Guide/Reference
> - Admin Guide
> - User Guide
>
> Install and Developer guides
> ----------------------------
>
> This should be Sphinx only, and no real point in making this
> information available inside Trac for normal use.
>
> I don't know Sphinx very well yet, but I suppose this means that they
> should only be available at the Trac site. And, as Noah mentioned we
> then build like nightly version for current dev (trunk) and whatever
> main stable branches we have in the future based on this. The guides
> are available as browseable HTML and PDF downloads or something as
> commonly done in projects.
>
> And, as noted above, we should make some effort to make a nicer
> template that suits us and used for all the Sphinx-generated guides...
>
> These guides are English only as I see it.

If we can come up with a good solution for localizing ReST  
documentation, and someone want to contribute the translations, I see  
no reason to not translate these too. I agree it need not be a  
priority though. Docstrings will probably always be in English.


> User and Admin guides
> ---------------------
>
> These are more complicated. They can also surely be available as
> Sphinx guides in various formats as above, but all content in these
> two guides must also be available inside Trac as they deal with normal
> usage - users need to reference it online, we need to link to this
> content and reference it in various situations.
>
> They need to be split into mini-guides with a general information (for
> all installations), and sections/chapters related to each component.
> The content should be available in a general trac/guide directory, and
> for each major component its pages should be in a directory like trac/
> versioncontrol/guide.
>
> For Sphinx, this means that the build script will need to pull in
> files from various locations. No doubt easily doable for someone that
> knows how.

I will check with the experts on this one.

>
> For Trac, it means we use the newhelp API idea and make a general Help
> page provider + providers for each of the components. Disable the
> versioncontrol component, and these Help pages also disappear from
> online help. Again, nothing complicated about that as it currently
> stands in the newhelp branch.
>
> The content pulled in for rendering inside Trac obviously needs to be
> renderable. Sphinx-customized rst files are currently not as they
> throw all kinds of errors when Sphinx is not installed. I think we all
> agree that Sphinx should not be a requirement for a vanilla
> installation, so we need to figure something out here.
>
> The current newhelp is format agnostic as long as it know the mimwtype
> and has a renderer for it, so I supose the alternatives are:
>
> Àre there other alternatives?

As I said before, for the shipped documentation, we will render down  
to plain HTML with sphinx-build, and include _only_ that HTML in egg  
file. The ReST docs are not needed from that point forward (as far as  
the user cares).

>
>
> Decisions to be made
> --------------------
>
> 1) Pluggability with regards to main docs. Currently the online help
> is pluggable, so that something like a blog plugin can provide
> additional pages available in the online guide. I see no point in
> directly extending this to the Sphinx documentation - newhelp should
> provide simple mechanisms for providing online help, but if plugin
> developers want to make a shiny PDF from Sphinx (or other tools) they
> do it on their own.
>
> Agree?

Indeed, the current API looks like it does all we need.

>
>
> 2) Localization in newhelp is supported, and currently uses the same
> pluggable mechanisms as a given plugin respons to one or more locales
> (or as a no-locale fallback). The Trac project only supplies default
> English guides, and leave it to plugins (language packs) to provide
> localized versions. Now, this is different from the pot and message
> strings strategy where we actually handle it. The subject of the apis
> and non-existent pluggability of message strings is related (although
> likely the subject of another thread), and we need to decide on the
> direction as it effects how we now transform the branch to new-help-
> and-docs (code + storage structure).
>
> Do we want/expect the Trac project to include the localiztions of
> documentation?

Yes, just not sure how best to do that.

>
>
> 3) What format do we use for content? Adopting Sphinx for all guides,
> it would make by far the most sense to move all documentation to rst.
> There are disagreements here, and personally I've been in the camp
> that would prefer that we use and improve the current Trac tools and
> markup for documentation. However, I'll go with the flow and respect
> the decision of what seems to be the majority of votes.
>
> Is the decision then made to convert all docs to restructured text
> (rst)?

Yes, this was agreed on already AFAIK. All docs, docstrings, etc will  
be ReST.

>
>
> Other issues
> ------------
>
> The TracDev/Proposals/NewHelp wiki page has some other open issues
> that are well kept in mind when finalizing the structure. For instance
> making the online guides searchable in various formats and languages.
> The proposal should be updated to cover all related issues once we
> have a shared sense of direction on this.

Will write more cogent updates next week.

--Noah
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