[Desktop_architects] ISV doc portal (was Re: What is your answer to solve the top inhibitor...)

[Bryce Harrington]

>>Yes, the concensus was that it would be difficult to host a developer
>>resource like this with any of the Linux distributions and/or desktop
>>organizations.  However, the distros and desktop organizations have the
>>content that is needed to make the portal meaningful.

>I think the solution to that dilemma is agregation. I can imagine OSDL
>defining a set of "how-to-questions", upstream technology providers
>(e.g. gnome, kde and trolltech) providing an answer to those questions
>based on the use of their technologies, and distributions wanting to
>ammend some of those answers to take into account distribution
>specifics. What is needed then is a web-infrastructure to shuffle that
>information around and allow the various parties to present those bits
>that are relevant to their audience as an integral part of their own
>websites without the need to actuallly duplicate creating that
>information.
>
>Think of it as the convergence of wikipedia+docbook+RSS+tagging.
>
>You would want to be able to tag information as "only relevant to Gtk+"
>or "only relevant to KDE 3.1 or older" (and differentiate between
>"relevant to applications based on KDE 3.1 libraries" and "relevant to
>applications running under a KDE 3.1 desktop")

Hi Waldo and others!

This morning John Cherry, myself and a couple of our managers met at
OSDL about this request from the desktop architect's meeting for OSDL to
help get this documentation portal effort started.  Here's a quick
recap:

As asked, we at OSDL will help gather an initial set of questions from
ISVs.  John is going to take this task, and speak with some of the
companies we've had contact with, plus use the input from members of
this list.  We don't expect we'll be able to come up with a definitive
set, though, but maybe we can set up a simple process for users to give
new questions.

Infrastructually, what we're thinking is to have two distinct sites.
The first is the "draft" portal, which will be implemented using a
Wikipedia-style wiki.  This site will allow developers and others to
contribute, edit, and review content as needed.  We will incorporate the
use of markers using the wikimedia tagging system to indicate articles
that have been sufficiently peer-reviewed and are appropriate for public
consumption.

>From this, once a month we will produce a tarball of the peer-reviewed
content from the wiki.  The format of this content is TBD, but could be
html, docbook, pdf, plain text, or a combination.  This tarball will be
used to generate a static site (to be hosted at OSDL intially, but could
be mirrored or moved later if needed) for ISV's to use.

Still tbd are the name for the site, the license to use for the content,
and what the intial Q's should be.  We have assigned people to look into
the latter two, and would welcome input on the first.

My hope is to have at least a mockup of the site and/or perhaps a 0.0
release of the tarball by Feb 1st, so if others have ideas or content,
please let me know.

Bryce