Let me start with a few relevant facts about my life.\u00a0 As some of you will know, I spend 60-70 hours every week helping with mailing lists, forums and userbase.\u00a0 It is a huge part of my life.\u00a0 However, in a few weeks’ time I will be 70, and I have a serious heart condition.\u00a0 I may be here for a few years yet, or I may be gone tomorrow.\u00a0 And what will be my legacy to KDE?\u00a0 At the moment it’s a handful (albeit a big handful) of wiki pages.\u00a0 That’s not what I want my legacy to be.<\/p>\n
I have a dream for that, and it’s realisable.\u00a0 I want to leave a system that will spell an end to ancient documentation.\u00a0 A system that is easy to use and light on time required to maintain it.\u00a0 A pipe-dream?\u00a0 No, I don’t think it is.\u00a0 Several people have said that drafting documentation on a wiki is much easier than working directly to docbook, but getting the parts to talk to each other really makes it difficult.\u00a0 I’ve talked to Albert Astals Cid about what would help language translation, and I’ve talked to Burkhard L\u00fcck about what the docbook team need, and I do believe we could get a usable system, and without much delay.\u00a0 Here’s what I propose:<\/p>\n
Stage 1 – the system is triggered by changes to userbase pages.\u00a0 It first addresses language needs.
\nQuestion: is it possible to create RSS feeds for certain groups of pages?
\nProblem:\u00a0 currently the Recent Changes RSS feed is broken, sending multiple copies of alerts.\u00a0 That would have to be fixed first.<\/p>\n
Stage 2 – A mediawiki extension outputs a .po syntax file for the changed page.\u00a0 I \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0understand that http:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/Extension:Translate would do that.\u00a0 Reading through the page, it looks as though a set of tools already exist that implement export and import.<\/p>\n
Stage 3 – the exported .po file arrives in SVN, where the system follows normal development lines.\u00a0 It may save translators considerable time if a diff of the last two versions is sent as well.\u00a0 This information is readily available through the History pages.<\/p>\n
Stage 4 – the mediawiki tool poimport.php is used to import the returned .po file into userbase.<\/p>\n
Stage 5 – starts the docbook cycle.\u00a0 The mediawiki extension http:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/Extension:XML_Bridge creates docbook XML from mediawiki pages.\u00a0 The proposal page http:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/DocBook_XML_export explains how it works.\u00a0 The resulting output could be made available through docs.kde.org, on distribution disks, and on userbase.<\/p>\n
If scripting is needed to make these stages flow, Sayak Banerjee, of forum fame, has agreed to write the scripts for us.\u00a0 Many thanks to Albert, Burkhard and Sayak for working with me on this.<\/p>\n
So – where does that leave us?\u00a0 Well, before extensions can be added they have to be tested.\u00a0 For me to do that I need Mediawiki setting up locally, and for that I need a LAMP stack.\u00a0 None of this is familiar to me, and I’d be working alone, without any form of help.\u00a0 I could do it, but in a reasonable time-frame?\u00a0 I doubt that.\u00a0 So what are the options?\u00a0 I’m assured that the system would be an enormous time-saver for the i18n and docs teams, so what is the best way forward from here?\u00a0 Is it possible, for instance, that I could have access to a LAMP stack somewhere else, to be used as a sandbox?\u00a0 I need all the help and ideas I can get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let me start with a few relevant facts about my life.\u00a0 As some of you will know, I spend 60-70 hours every week helping with mailing lists, forums and userbase.\u00a0 It is a huge part of my life.\u00a0 However, in a few weeks’ time I will be 70, and I have a serious heart condition.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14,6],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kde","tag-kde","tag-userbase"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lydgate.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}