Using userbase for manuals

[Kevin Ottens]

On Sunday 1 July 2012 09:21:08 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Diumenge, 1 de juliol de 2012, a les 08:02:28, Boudewijn Rempt va 
escriure:
> > I'm actually not sure kde-core-devel is the right list... But the e.V.
> > mailing list certainly isn't, and we don't seem to have any place for
> > discussions that affect KDE as a whole.
> > 
> > In any case, Ingo Malchow said in his blog
> > (http://blog.neverendingo.de/?p=125)
> > 
> > "We have a great userbase.kde.org but developers don’t use it that much,
> > nor is there any links from applications towards Userbase."
> > 
> > Well, actually we have. I replaced the offline help documentation in Krita
> > with a link to the manual on userbase. I have done this for two reasons:
> > 
> > * I couldn't maintain the offline manual anyway after the change to 2.0
> > * this way the user gets sent right to the place where they can contribute
> > to the manual (and I've got users contributing to it now)
> > 
> > I'm not concerned that users cannot access the help when they are
> > off-line.
> > That's a vanishingly rare situation these days
> 
> I disagree, as a matter of fact, I don't have internet connection in the
> room in my hostel, so if i had a need to use krita I'd need to read its
> manual (since my painting/drawing skills are null) and i'd be not happy to
> discover I can't read the manual.

It's all very hypothetical isn't it? :-)

More seriously, I think we shouldn't loose perspective here. Yes, you're 
right, it *can* happen, but Boudewijn is also right, it's becoming rare 
situation.

My opinion is that I would love to go for it, and if over time that turns out 
to be a problem, we could ship a dump of the relevant wiki content along the 
application. It'd be used as fallback if the wiki cannot be reached online. 
This way we'd still benefit from the better contribution scalability of 
userbase compared to our current situation. That'd make for a more complex 
solution on the client side though, that's why I wouldn't jump the gun on it 
immediately.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud patron of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20120701/0396c20e/attachment.sig>