Using userbase for manuals

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

Am Sonntag, 1. Juli 2012, 09:21:08 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> El Diumenge, 1 de juliol de 2012, a les 08:02:28, Boudewijn Rempt va 
escriure:
> > 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.

+1

There are lot of nice places on this planet where there is no (good or cheap) 
internet connection. Which is fine in one way (gives you a break without 
needing to find excuses :) ) but bad for dependency on on-line stuff.

You preinstall most of your application as well, and do not apt-get them on-
demand (modulo web apps), right? :)

So at least being able to get snapshots of the stuff in userbase (as packages) 
would be really needed.

Otherwise I agree. The strange duplication between userbase and manuals 
ideally finds an end in the near future, and with the current efforts on 
translation support another show stopper has been removed.

Next on my wishlist would be a proper consistent structure on userbase, so 
documentation for different versions of a program is supported. After all 
there are usually versions of a program in use out there, and you do not want 
to disappoint those which can not update or do not want to update.

Cheers
Friedrich