[ardour-dev] manual plan change

[Paul Davis]

After much consideration, I have decided on a change of plan for the
Ardour manual. As with many things in my life, I have to get
realistic, and there are 2 aspects of reality that have to be
acknowledged here:

    1) with the current plan for manual (Paul writes it), there will
        be no manual.
    2) likely income from the manual is going to be pretty small,
        insufficient to make ardour a viable income source to live
	on, or even be a significant part of it.

I believe that a better strategy is to follow a wiki-based model,
where ardour.org will host a wiki (probably MediaWiki, as used by
Wikipedia), and anybody can contribute to the manual.

There is a proviso: I will still reserve the right to later publish a
manual (probably via CafePress), and collect any revenues that come
from it. I feel OK about this, given my own investment in Ardour's
development. If you don't feel OK this, then please just don't
contribute to the Wiki. Feel free to write your own documentation
elsewhere.

So for the time being, there are a couple of immediate outstanding
tasks:

   a) install mediawiki on ardour.org. 
        - taybin has sorta-kinda said he would do this, but he
	  may have a lot on his plate right now, and there may
	  be someone here with experience of mediawiki.

   b) move the material from the existing (LaTeX) manual into 
          the wiki.

Longer term, we will need tools to extract the documentation from the
manual and render it as HTML or LaTex. These might exist already. I
would also like someone (or more than one person) to take on the role
of day-to-day editor for the wiki, checking edits on a regular basis,
etc. etc. I will remain "executive editor", shaping the manual as I
see appropriate. 

I hope that in making this decision, I am opening up possibilities,
not closing them down. Let me know what you think.

--p