Release process for Xorg 7.1

[Egbert Eich]

Kevin E Martin writes:
 > 
 > For those who might not know, the decision to put all of the old docs
 > into a single package was made for primarily one reason: There was
 > discussion last year about converting the docs from the various old
 > formats to a modern format.  Then, as each doc is converted, it could be
 > moved out of the docs package and put into a more appropriate package.
 > I'm not sure if/when that will happen, so if people would like to go
 > ahead and spread the old format docs out to the appropriate packages now
 > and then convert them to a modern format later, that's okay by me.  I
 > just don't want to desire to convert the docs to a modern format to be
 > lost in the shuffle here.
 > 

The doc conversion was a project advocated by JG. 
Unfortunately he had been rather busy lately so he 
he did not follow up on this.
It would definitely make sense to move the docs
to the individual packets when the format conversion 
is done. 
However currently there is nothing but a vague desire
to do so at some point in time.

Maybe there is somebody here who'd be interested in 
taking on this task to make a plan how the conversion 
should be performed,propose this plan and execute it.

- There needs to be a consensus on the format to use.
- We need to have a consensus what the target formats
  should be (I assume we need to be able to generate 
  traditional man pages as well as specs in book form.)
- Tools need to exist to convert to the desired target
  formats.
- Tools should exist to make doc writing easy.

Alternatively we could decide to hire out this work:
JG had an offer by Eric S. Raymond who would do the
work (it wouldn't be entirely free but it would not
be expensive either and may well be in X.Org's budget).

Since the doc conversion is not exactly development work
we could hire someone to do it - still this is a rather
touchy issue since it is generally counter productive
to do such hiring in open source projects.
Therefore it's preferrable if we had some volunteers.
Also I expect a conversion plan still needs to be made
and agreed to here before any conversion is done.

Maybe we can collect a few opinions here?

Cheers,
	Egbert.