Doc BoF at EuroBSDCon

[Tom Rhodes]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 22:19:32 +0100
Marc Fonvieille <blackend at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 04:05:26PM -0500, Tom Rhodes wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > OBJDIR was broken way before mirrors.xml.  Also, I'm not really
> > > > talking about starting on a clean slate.  Of course parts of the the
> > > > current buildsystem is just fine, but others are just a mess.
> > > >
> > > 
> > > I can confirm that, since I'm guilty of this OBJDIR issue.  It's not
> > > possible to "easily" fix it without changing a lot of things, so it's
> > > better to start a rewrite from zero.
> > 
> > Which is a lot of work, I think everyone agrees on that.  But
> > we can do it.  There is a handful of smart and well meaning
> > committers here who I feel, if given more time and pointed in
> > a direction of "what we should do" will come through perfectly.
> > 
> > Right now all we have been doing is bouncing around doing
> > whatever.  There is just no real sense of direction.
> >
> 
> Some of us and I gave in past some requirements and some ways to fix it,
> it should be available in the archives.
> I spent some times trying to fix it in a clean way, I gave up cause of
> lack of time.  The change I did to the build allowed localized PDF
> version of docs to use en_US and localized images, before this change it
> was impossible to do that and to have images, so I had 2 choices:
> 
> - backing out the change and users of OBJDIR would be happy and waiting
>   for someone to take care of the localized PDF issue in a better way
>   (this could take months or years)
> - keeping the change and offering to a lot of non-english readers the
>   chance to be able to read/use/download a localised PDF version of the
>   translated Handbooks
> 
> You know my choice.  If people really want to back out my change, let's
> do it, but I still think the most important "thing" is the fact we can
> offer the doc to people that do not read english.

Would be nice, but are you sure you can't come up with a better
solution?

-- 
Tom Rhodes