[Bf-docboard] Welcome!

[Bart Veldhuizen]

Hi,

welcome to the Blender Documentation Project (BDP) maillist. As Ton
wrote yesterday, the Foundation is working hard to install a SourceForge
style project environment on blender.org. In the mean time we can use
this maillist to get the BDP going. 

Stefan, Ton and I have already been discussing some issues.
Unfortunately, Stefan is out of town & offline until Friday, but I think
we can start thinking about some things before he returns.

The main issues are:

1) Select a license. This is a subject that I know little about. Stefan
and Ton are discussing this and Stefan is adapting the BSD license into
a 'Blender Artistic License'. We'll hear more when Stefan returns.

2) Define the 'products'. Stefan has written a detailed plan for this
(and I'll leave it to him to present that here). The main products are:
User documentation (manual,reference, tutorials), Programmer
documentation (Code reference, architecture descriptions etc) and
Metadocuments (License, Styleguide etc).

3) Choose a fileformat. DocBook/XML seems to be a good fileformat as
it's text-based (--> nice for CVS), separates content from layout (-->
nice for publication), has tools available for conversion into formats
like HTML and PDF and is well documented. The drawback is that it's
quite technical, and this might scare people away. We have proposed that
people can deliver additions in other formats as well, and they will get
translated to DocBook by a BDP volunteer.

4) Define a Table of Contents and try to boot up the project. I've
written a proposal for this (along with some test content) in DocBook
XML here: http://www.vrotvrot.com/BlenderDoc/BlenderManual.pdf.zip (also
available as .gz). You can grab the sources from
http://www.vrotvrot.com/BlenderDoc/BlenderManual.tar.gz . If you know
DocBook, please have a look at it and see if what I did makes sense (I
tried to keep Felix' remarks in mind ;-) If you have any changes or
additions, please email me the changed files and I'll merge in the
changes.

5) Get a CVS account up and running on blender.org. Ton is talking to
Hans about that now, but they're both very busy. Also, the upcoming
SourceForge implementation seems to be eating a lot of their time. For
the time I use my own CVS server. I won't give CVS accounts away because
that would (as far as I know) require people to be able to log in to
vrotvrot.com. If you have anything that you would like to commit just
send it to me and I'll do it for you (and update the tarballs).

What I would like to do until Stefan gets back is to work on the
proposed Table of Contents and try to get that published at the end of
this week. If you would like to experiment a bit by placing some
sensible content into the framework, please go ahead and see how you
like working with DocBook. Af the and of the week we can then post a
call for participation and find volunteers to help us. 

Please share your ideas on this approach with us.

Cheers,

Bart