Re: [Plplot-devel] New documentation at our SF website

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> I am also having some other www-install troubles for non-html results
> which I am investigating further.

The problems I alluded to (which caused only part of the documentation to be
installed at SF) are almost certainly more dependency issues. For now I
worked around these problems for the Debian docbuild by starting with a
fresh checkout which insured ultimately that all documentation was installed
at SF by make www-install.

Please everybody have a look at these documentation results
(http://plplot.sourceforge.net/resources/docbook-manual/) to make sure the
current content is presented properly for *all output forms*. I have already
noticed the search function in acroread for the pdf form sometimes doesn't
work (try searching for plplot repeatedly and you soon run into problems
with "unlocked objects", info cross-references sometimes don't work, and
Rafael's last name is not presented properly for many forms of the
documentation. There may be other backend problems as well.  BTW Rafael, I
am glad you gracefully gave in to my wishes and kept the dvi form. You
should try using xdvi on that form; the result looks good and the
cross-references seem to work which is already a step up from the postscript
form (where I believe cross-references are outside the postscript paradigm
completely).

My PLplot priorities before the April release are the following:

* Get the RedHat doc build working as well as the Debian build.  (To be
started later tonight, but this will probably be finished next weekend
because this is a critical week for my fortran contract job.) Update
README.developers according to my RedHat experiences.

* Collaborate with Joao to help him build the documentation on SuSe.

* Sort out the dependency issues in the Makefile.am files in doc/docbook
and subdirectories.

* Report documentation backend issues (as above) so that Rafael can attempt
to deal with them.

* Try to sort out any syntax problems in docbook/xml content that you guys
provide.  I want to strongly encourage your contributions this way and also
by helping you to build the documentation yourself (see the higher priority
above).  Ultimately documentation is every developer's responsibility so I
don't like the present setup where only Rafael and I can do it.

* Upgrade some documentation content myself. (I doubt I will have any time
for this before the release compared to the above priorities.)

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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Linux-powered Science
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