On Feb 23, 2008, at 10:39 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:
Not as far as I'm concerned. It irks me no end to be browsing though the release image on my machine and find myself referencing some data on some website. Currently this occurs when I browse the documentation on my local version of the SVN trunk. This is because the html versions of the documentation aren't included - which is OK if they are generated by the installation process or downloaded with the release. I would be curious as to what the plans are in this regard.
We build all of the HTML and put it into the release tarball, overwriting the HTML files in Subversion that just forward to the web site. It's what we've done ever since we've used BoostBook for some of the libraries.
Obviously active pages such as bug tracker are going to require internet connectivity. But what's the argument for not making the other release and web pages one thing? Seems easier to me even if it make the release bigger. By making two things, it creates another maintainence task.
There may be technical arguments against making release and web pages the same, e.g., because the web pages might make use of CSS that we don't want to ship in the release or, more importantly, PHP that won't be available for most users when browsing locally. So, I think we're looking to minimize redundancy between the web pages and release documentation, and generating both from a single source where that's not the right answer. - Doug