Subject: Re: HOWTO maintainer needed
From: Paul Gortmaker <[email-masked]>
To: Linux Documentation Project writers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 02:16:35 -0500

> 
> Terry Dawson <[email-masked]> writes:
> > I've held off replying to this in the hope that someone else would
> > but since I haven't yet seen a reply to it I guess I'll have to volunteer
> > after all. I would be happy to do the latter part, doing the archiving.
> > I don't have enough hard drive to do the first, I can't even install Tex.
> 
> Lars Wirzenius has also half-volunteered, and it might be possible for you,
> he, and Paul to work together. Of prime importance is the ability to
> "rdist" (or otherwise easily update) files on Sunsite, directly to the
> FTP and WWW file spaces set up there. If this is difficult for any of

I imagine that Terry's connections to sunsite are similar to mine, and
usually range from "pathetic" to "my modem is better than this".  Also,
the ramifications of AARNET's (Aus. internet provider) decision to go
with volume charging (I haven't got any bills yet...) are not clear.
I am sure that this affects Terry as well. Also, I will probably be
off the net for an undetermined period of time come Sept/Oct. 

However, all excuses aside, I guess I can help with the formatting
of the SGML stuff for those that *don't/can't* run LaTeX up until
(a) I get a huge net bill, or (b) I am off the net. Consider this
only a "stop-gap" measure. For those that can format stuff themselves, 
they can bypass sending it to me. But the question remains as to
what I (and others) do with the formatted output. Do I send Terry (for 
example) a uuencoded tar file with ASCII, DVI, HTML, PS etc? (BTW, I sent
one of these to Don once -- it was ~1/2MB) If we had a well defined
tar file structure (say subdirs ps, html, sgml, dvi, ps, ascii) then
unpacking/uploading/posting would be a lot easier for the archive
maintainer (again, for example, Terry).

The problem with just sending SGML to the maintainer (as Matt will
testify) is that a document that "works" with nroff may fail with
LaTeX or html. Then the maintainer spends hours squashing buglets
in the document so that it can generate all "n" types of output.
This is too much work for one person, and is why Matt is going
bezerk. (Either that or he is just playing SVGA DOOM all the time ;-)
Which puts us back to having each howto author generating
all the individual formats and sending (largish) tar files to the
maintainer, and having me as an (infrequently used) interim step for 
those without LaTeX.

> So, what do you all think? Can we talk about what you want to do and
> the technical details? As I said before it might be easier for one
> person to handle submissions and updates---this includes updates of
> current HOWTOs in ASCII and SGML, as well as handling the details of
> adding new HOWTOs to the tree. (A well-known e-mail alias might be
> the best thing for this, in case the maintainer changes in the future.)

Seeing as it is a smallish group, we should be able to manage without
an alias. Ideally, all the howto authors should be rec'ing this
mailing list -- perhaps it should be a requirement of being a
howto author...  ;-)

Paul.