[ardour-dev] manual plan change

[Joern Nettingsmeier]

Paul Davis wrote:
> 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.

excellent! i really welcome your decision.
votes++

btw, re revenue: there are now local paypal sites in most european 
countries that allow for domestic bank transactions, which means users 
can throw some money your way without most of it getting eaten underway 
by commission charges and the like.

> 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.

i have set up a mediawiki at our university (not yet in production, 
however it runs smoothly but for one little mysql hiccup), and it's trivial.
i'd be glad to set one up for you, but i have this gut feeling that 
providing me with the necessary login credentials is more work than 
setting up the wiki....


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

that should be possible with a little bit of scripting...

> Longer term, we will need tools to extract the documentation from the
> manual and render it as HTML or LaTex. These might exist already.

not sure. but if we maintain a rigourous structure and abstain from eye 
candy, using only semantically relevant wiki markup, this won't be too hard.

regards,

jörn