[dev] wiki as help

[Eric Jon Rostetter]

Quoting duck at obala.net:

> As I remember, time ago we discussed the feature of our “help”  
> mechanism. Some purposed to drop the help.xml files (are really  
> outdated) and to use wiki. But Jan objected, because as we cannot  
> use it off-line.

I agree with Jan, but...

> Of course this can be used to sync offline installations. So we can  
> drop the help.xml. Or we can create a new renderer to prepare help  
> files from wiki pages and distribute them with the releases. Even I  
> think that is better to link help to wiki.horde.org, this should  
> bring more documentation contributions.

We could create a wiki to maintain the help pages, and a process as
described to convert the wiki pages to the help.xml files for the
distributions.  In the resulting help.xml files can be a link to
the wiki 'for more current/up-to-date help information see ...' or
some such...

> Any Ideas?

I'm not against keeping the system we have now.  In fact, it has some
advantages (local customizations are easier, etc).  But if we did as
above (a wiki, which is extracted to be included in the release), then
this might be the best of both worlds.

I know of several projects that do a wiki, and then tar-ball the wiki
as html or text into each distribution.  So this would be just an extension
of that idea (help files instead of tar balls).  We'd just need an
automated process to convert the wiki into help.xml files...

> Duck

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

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