Re: New lilypond website - documentation

[David Kastrup]

"Andrew Bernard" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello All,
>
> Since the website has suddenly come up again as a topic, while I
> disagree with a lot of the talk here, allow me for once to say
> something positive. Concerning the documentation on the website, this
> has always been a good idea because it is indexed by search engines –
> I often find it is easier to google a search for something in the
> lilypond manuals than using other ways! So keeping the documentation
> online, and building it from the source code in an automated process
> is an excellent design criterion.
>
> In terms of ‘modernity’ which people seem to be keenly interested in
> [I am not convinced that this is a primary goal of web development, as
> more often than not modernity is mere ephemeral fashion], then I would
> like to point out that there is an excellent open source solution for
> online documentation called ReadTheDocs.

Let's put this into perspective: at any point of time, there are few
people working on LilyPond's core documentation.

LilyPond has been around for dozens of years.  So has its documentation.
So has Texinfo.  I don't think we can expect the manpower to shift
everything (PDF, HTML, Info) to a new documentation source format every
dozen years or so.

> http://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
>
> Since I believe one should put one’s money where one’s mouth is (!) I
> would be very happy to investigate this solution and code and
> implement it, and maintain it for the lilypond community.

And all translations?  For, let's say, 20 years at least?

I just don't think that LilyPond can sensibly afford to hop on every
passing bandwagon with its 1000+ pages of English documentation and its
multiple thousands of translated pages.

-- 
David Kastrup