RE: Wine User Guide Improvements

[Scott Ritchie]

Brian,

I agree with your plan to condense the guide down.  I would still keep
some parts of the Getting Wine chapter and put it at the end of the
introduction, or possibly at the beginning of configuring wine.  I agree
about changing it to be mostly a reference to the relevant parts of
WineHQ.  Would it be duplicitous of me to just go ahead and redo the
Getting Wine chapter and leave it as it is now, and perhaps merge it
into configuring/introduction once you're done?

That way we'll have 4 chapters:
Introduction
Configuring Wine
Running Wine
Troubleshooting

The running wine chapter eventually needs to be rewritten too (outdated
switches, etc.)  It could probably be reorganized a bit to read nicer as
well (for example, directions for uninstalling programs are given before
running them.)

I'd like to have the documentation revamped by the next release.
Combined with the coming winecfg patches, the major red marks at
http://www.winehq.org/site/todo_lists can be replaced with happy green
bars.  I think we can easily have the yellow bit for the User Guide
finished by then too.  After that, the only major things in the way of
0.9 seem to be the developer and winelib guide, which are a bit beyond
my abilities.

(note: forwarded to wine-devel for further feedback)

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

Wine User Guide Improvements

[Brian Vincent]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:55:45 -0700, Scott Ritchie  wrote:
> I agree with your plan to condense the guide down.  I would still keep
> some parts of the Getting Wine chapter and put it at the end of the
> introduction, or possibly at the beginning of configuring wine.  I agree
> about changing it to be mostly a reference to the relevant parts of
> WineHQ.  Would it be duplicitous of me to just go ahead and redo the
> Getting Wine chapter and leave it as it is now, and perhaps merge it
> into configuring/introduction once you're done?

Well, configuring.sgml should probably mostly stay the way it is now
until the config file is vanquished.  Then I can merge the changes I
have with it (and make sure they're up to date.)  Other than that, feel
free to work on whatever you want.  Two things I'd suggest:

1) There is a working outline here.. you just have to peer really 
close at the existing stuff and move things around a bit to see it.

2) Be careful about losing info that could be useful.  For instance,
fonts.sgml really needs to go away, but there is info in there that
at least three or four people in this world might find interesting.  I
was thinking of moving relevant parts into /tools like fnt2bdf or maybe
even create a man page for the relevant tools.

Also, I find tidy and xmllint useful for making sure the sgml has
proper opening/closing tag pairs, etc.
> I'd like to have the documentation revamped by the next release.

Up to date Wine docs?  I'm not sure the world is ready for it.

-Brian