[GRASS-dev] Grass Documentation How-to html page

[Hamish]

Eric wrote:

> Borrowing heavily from my conversations with Maciek, I have written a
> step-by-step how-to for improving Grass documentation, specifically
> man pages. I welcome any feedback and suggestions for improvement. My
> knowledge of html is pretty basic, hopefully there aren't too many
> errors. It looks OK to me in Firefox. I was thinking perhaps this page
> could be linked/inserted into the main Grass GDP page, so it can be
> easily found for those who are interested in improving the
> documentation. 


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. Can you put this up on the wiki? (probably in
the development section) The sooner the GDP is migrated out of the web
site CVS and into the wiki and truely group maintained the better for
everyone IMO.  [ps. -- is the wiki being backed up? available as .zip
for burning to a CD for access to help when in the field?]

> Let me know what you think,

Add a link to help page translation efforts?

> To begin, you must obtain the latest Grass source code from the CVS
> repositories.

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.

Note how to add images. (r.terraflow, v.voronoi,...)
see doc/html_documentation.txt

> 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.

There's no reason you can't make a copy and work from that, and no
reason you have to be root. The CVS source doesn't need to have any
superuser access, it's proably very good advice that it isn't given such
rights. "cvs diff" may no longer work, but that's not the end of the
world if you hung on to the original.

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



thanks,
Hamish