Documentation volunteer(s) needed

[Holly Bostick]

Brian Vincent schreef:
> Hopefully I can make this easier on someone.  Also, I'm cc'ing Scott 
> Ritchie since he mentioned at one point he was interested in this.
> 
> The docs now live in a separate CVS tree, I don't have the details
> for that.  After grabbing them from CVS, you'll want to make sure you
> have the docbook tools available for compiling.  In the docs
> directory you can just do a "make html" or some such in order to
> generate nicely viewable material to help with editing.
> 
> I started in on this about a year ago and there's a pretty good 
> outline to work from.  Some of the actual content is just plain wrong
>  now, but it's probably about 90% accurate.  There have been changes 
> the the DLL Overrides and Drive Settings part of Winecfg.  I'd also 
> consider this stuff to be a little light on the configuration side. 
> For example, to configure just application settings you need to add
> an app on the first tab of winecfg and then make the overrides on the
>  second tab.  I don't think this discusses how that per-app stuff is 
> done (it also affects Graphics.)

One other question in this regard; I'm currently running 20050830. Do I
need to compile from CVS to get a more accurate picture of the current
state of what I'm documenting, or is the current release (naturally I'll
update to the September release as soon as I see it) 'close enough'?
> 
> 
> <snip of very useful current status information>
> 
> Going forward, we have a lot of documentation in the User Guide about
>  downloading Wine, compiling Wine, CVS, etc; mostly stuff that's
> already duplicated in some form or another on the web site.  I'd like
> to see as much stuff like that removed from the User Guide as
> possible, we can simply refer people to WineHQ for more info.  (I
> think the reason for the duplication is that the website docs simply
> didn't exist when the User Guide was written, now the website has
> superceded the User Guide.) When it's all said and done we should be
> left with the following sections: - Introduction - Configuration -
> Running - Troubleshooting
> 

OK, that's at least an outline of what you/we aim to achieve which is
(very) good, of course. Nothing more to say until I've looked at the
current material, but I can see the benefits of aiming for simplicity
and clarity.

I hope the release is stable enough to support these goals (I have faith).

Oh yeah, another question-- are we making provision for 'special
circumstances'? I've got an ATI card, which makes me sensitive to such
things, since the ATI drivers fail to do many things that they should,
and often additional provisions need to be made specifically to get an
app or game to run with the stupid fglrx drivers, where no such config
workarounds need to be used with nVidia cards, or so I've heard. Or does
that just fall under 'Troubleshooting'? Or does Wine not need such
workarounds at all (unlike Cedega)? My Wine install seems to be acting a
bit flakey atm, and I'm not sure why, so I haven't gotten as far with my
current project of documenting what works where (Wine vs. Cedega) as I
would like, and it makes it hard to be sure whether something that works
under Cedega but not under Wine is because I can configure Cedega to
work around some ATI problems, whereas I can't with Wine, or whether
it's because my Wine install is acting flakey, or because Wine is kinda
broke atm in some ways.
> 
> --------
> 
> There's enough material on this topic to practically write a book. 
> Someone should think about that.

Didn't you get a replacement co-author yet?? Amazing, if true. But
that's another discussion :) .

Thanks for the info; I'll get over to the documentation CVS later
tonight or early tomorrow.

Holly