-----Original Message-----
From: Hamish
To: Patton, Eric
Cc: grass-dev@grass.itc.it
Sent: 10/2/2006 1:38 AM
Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] Grass Documentation How-to html page
Eric wrote:
Borrowing heavily from my conversations with Maciek, I have written a
step-by-step how-to for improving Grass documentation
Hamish:
Glad to see this, sometimes with GRASS development I think (like GIS)
often the answers are simple to find & easy to enact, *if you know where
to look* before you start looking. This sort of tutorial goes a long way
to fixing that problem.
Thanks.
Hmaish:
Can you put this up on the wiki? (probably in the development section)
Sure.
Hamish:
Add a link to help page translation efforts?
Sure.
Hamish:
link to the CVS web interface, or write a script to pluck the latest
description.html file for any given module. (aim for really low barrier
to entry) Little html experience is needed.
I thought I had included a link to the CVS how-to :
"To begin, you must obtain the latest Grass source code from the CVS
repositories. Detailed instructions on how to do so can be found <a
href:"http://grass.itc.it/faq/cvs_howto">here\.</a>"
But I think I got the formatting wrong, because this link is broken; it just
links back to itself. Actually, all the html links don't work. Can you see
anything obviously wrong?
Hamish:
Note how to add images. (r.terraflow, v.voronoi,...)
see doc/html_documentation.txt
Ok, I'll have to brush up on how to do this, as I've never tried it yet.
Eric:
Once you have downloaded the CVS source code, open a terminal and
change directory to /your_cvs_directory/grass6/vector/v.in.ascii. You
have to make your edits/corrections to the original copy of the
module's description.html page within grass6/vector/v.in.ascii, not a
copy of this page.
Open a text editor and make your edits to description.html. Depending
on where your cvs source is on disk, you may have to do so as root
(Ex: sudo gedit description.html). Save your edits by overwriting the
original description.html.
Hamish:
There's no reason you can't make a copy and work from that, and no
reason you have to be root. T "cvs diff" may no longer work, but that's not
the end of the
world if you hung on to the original.
Maciek had advised me to make diffs from the original description html,
because I had tried diffing a copy of a manpage somewhere in /home, and he
had problems applying it to CVS. (?) I'm not sure why it didn't work, just
following suggestions. I'll CC: him on this to see why.
Hamish:
The CVS source doesn't need to have any superuser access, it's proably very
good advice that >it isn't given such rights.
My cvs source is located in /opt, where my Grass installation folder is
located, so that's probably why I wrote that. I'll modify that to include
your suggestions.
Hamish:
If editing in the source tree is a problem, just make a copy of the file
and:
diff -u /usr/src/grass/.../description.html description.html.NEW
I think this was what I tried originally with Maciek, where we ran into
problems. Not sure. Aanyway, I'll change the how-to to mention that one copy
any description.html into a safe place like /home, make edits, then create a
diff -u against their source description.html - sound good?
Thanks for the feedback,
~ Eric.