Yelp 2.27.1, Now With More Ducks

[news 28]

I've just released Yelp 2.27.1, Now With More Ducks.

This coincides with gnome-doc-utils 0.17.1, Also Now

With More Ducks. This marks the first release with

Mallard support built in. And this marks the end of

the boring part of the release announcement.

 

This is a huge shift in how we approach, plan, write,

and generally work with documentation. The entire

community needs to be aware of what's happening and

how it affects them. Fellow hackers, please skip to

the bottom for information on how this affects you.

 

Mallard is a new[1] documentation format that is geared

towards topic-oriented help. While you could, in theory,

just convert all of your DocBook documentation to Mallard,

what you would end up with is a document that is the worst

of both worlds. Writing topic-based help requires a new

way of thinking about how we present information to our

readers.

 

Mallard is uniquely designed from the ground up to support

downstream modification and plugin-based help systems with

little to no patching. The dynamic organization structure

of Mallard was designed with our help in mind, addressing

the challenges we face as an upstream provider.

 

If you're interested in writing, editing, reviewing, or

otherwise contributing to our documentation, please get

in touch with our team. You can email use at

gnome-doc-list ( -at -) gnome.org

or join us in the #docs channel on irc.gnome.org. Also,

check out our brand new project blog:

http://blogs.gnome.org/docs/

 

We will be holding regular community meetings. Stay

tuned for more details.

 

If you are a maintainer or active developer, know that we

are coming for your documentation. It might not be today,

but it's on our radar. If you or someone on your team

handles your documentation independently of our team, we

still want to be in contact to help them produce better

help. Writing is not a one-person task.

 

We hope that developers will be cooperative with our team

as we try to provide them with better help files to make

their software better for their users.

 

We also hope that more people from the greater community,

including our downstream communities, will get involved

with our team. We are doing some truly exciting things

right now, and we'd love to share the excitement.

 

Fearlessly,

Shaun

 

[1] Yes, I realize I've been quacking since 2004. But

it's newly released, and that counts for something.

 

 

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