Re: [gentoo-soc] Dynamic Documentation generation

[Sven Vermeulen]

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 08:41:57PM -0700, Brian Dolbec wrote:
> It is getting rather late to be just starting research for a project
> proposal when the deadline to submit is only 15 hours from now.
>
> The contact person for that is not online at the moment. So unless you
> already know what you need to do, I am afraid that you probably will not
> get the information needed to submit a successful proposal.

The deadline is indeed quite soon. Nevertheless, some resources and
information about the project suggestion...

A while ago, work was done on a Django-based framework that could (would)
provide a new interface, layout but also new features on the Gentoo website.
This project was called Okupy [1]. Due to lack of resources and the
necessary push in the organization, Okupy is left as a "in-development"
project.

[1] http://blogs.gentoo.org/tampakrap/tag/okupy/

In this project suggestion, the idea is to enhance Okupy to provide
conversion of our internal documentation format (GuideXML and the related
XML formats) into other formats (beyond XHTML, which it already supports).
ePub has been asked a few times (especially for the Gentoo Handbook), PDF as
well.

To integrate this in Okupy also means to verify if these translations are
fast and powerful enough to do on a dynamically generated site. If not,
you'll need to look into caching (well, let's say you need to. period.) and
perhaps even pregeneration of the documents (especially for PDF as most
conversion methods are CPU intensive).

If this looks too easy for a GSoC project, consider integrating other
document formats as master (like wiki, docbook, ...) which will have more
consequences, as Okupy currently uses the XML files as the only master. But
accepting input from other formats allows us to find more documentation
providers for our documentation repository.

Wkr,
	Sven Vermeulen