GDP Status Report

1.  Status Reports

Preliminaries

This is the status of the Gentoo Documentation Project. It will be posted regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to gentoo-doc@gentoo.org or to me personally.

The Gentoo Documentation Project, from now on abbreviated to GDP, has its own project page (just like almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find it at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp.

Content

This status mail will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives and/or projects related to the GDP:

• Printable Documentation
• Handbook Development
• French Handbook Translation
• New/Rewritten Documentation
• Hiatus'es

2.  Printable Documentation

Sven Vermeulen has given up on the development of XSL-FO stylesheets to convert the current existing documentation to XSL-FO (which can be rendered to PDF). The main issue is:

• He's not good in graphical designs
• Unable to dynamically guess the table column widths
• Issues with rendering images (with <fig> and <figure>)
• Issues with nested constructions (<pre> inside a <ul> listing with some <p>'s and <note>'s inside).

At this point, the bugs that deal with this have been updated:

• 31672 has been reassigned to docs-team@gentoo.org and is open for further development from other developers (if they want).
• 36761 has shifted focus to provide a link to the printable page of each chapter in the menubar and is now FIXED.

People interested in having a PDF version of the handbook (for printing pleasure) can always contact Sven Vermeulen, he can provide you with a "Mozilla-printed-and-converted" PDF (such as this one). This is however unofficial.

Tim Yamin is working on the handbook xslfo file and has already done quite an amasing job. More information will be posted later :)

3.  Handbook Development

With the upcoming required Gentoo 2004.0 changes the documentation (to be more precise, the Gentoo Handbook) requires some major updates.

The first update is to support GRP packages to more extend:

• Improve description of GRP
• Support downloading of GRP

Most of these updates require changes in chapter 5. The current draft version of that chapter can be found online.

A second update is the removal of the LVM instructions. This is necessary because of issues we have with LVM1 vs LVM2 and users that boot both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Although it is perfectly possible to have an LVM-based system that runs on both kernels, we currently dismissed the instructions until further notice.

A third update that has recently been applied is concerning the new genkernel instructions.

4.  French Handbook Translation

After several weeks (months) of hard work, the French translation team has managed to completely translate the Gentoo Handbook. This makes the French translation team the first team that completed the translation.

Kudos from the whole documentation team to Xavier Neys, Benjamin Girault, Camille Huot, Olivier Fisette, Olivier Roomans, Vincent Strubel and the other people that I might have forgotten to mention!

5.  New/Rewritten Documentation

Gustavo Felisberto (HumpBack on irc) has rewritten the GnuPG User Guide and included a section on Public Key Cryptography.

6.  Hiatus'es

Gerald J. Normandin Jr. will be on a hiatus from January 21st until somewhere in June/July for academisc reasons.

Sven Vermeulen will decrease his activity and focus primarily on the Handbook development until February 7th.

Lots of other documentation developers seem to be less active these days, so documentation development may be stalled a bit.