[development] Preparing for 5.0 string freeze

[Angela Byron]

On 16-Nov-06, at 4:28 AM, Gabor Hojtsy wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Angela Byron wrote:
>> b) Reading of error messages, help text, field descriptions, etc.  
>> for clarity. If something's not clear, we need patches submitted  
>> to make it more clear.
>
> The 4.7 release have seen help text edited and refined as handbook  
> pages. Was this only an initial energizing method, or does this  
> method failed? Now it does not seam that the 5.0 help texts will  
> get generated from handbook pages as it seems.

The old method did work, but relied on two things:

a) Drupal.org offering a book "export" feature, which was since  
removed from core book module during the 4.7 release cycle.
b) Drupal.org exporting books in Docbook format, which was also since  
removed form the export scripts, in favour of "DXML" (Drupal XML)  
which provides better context into stuff like "this is a node title"  
and such (as opposed to merely screen-scraping).

So the "docbook2helphook" script I slaved for weeks over last fall  
has to be completely rewritten now, and I just plain have not had  
time/energy to do it. It's also problematic because only one version  
of a given page may live at the handbook/modules/blah URL, and we  
don't want to scrap 4.7 docs in favour of 5.0 ones until 5.0 is  
stable. Chicken and egg.

For Drupal 6.x, "module.help" files are probably the way to go, and  
leave hook_help to just little supplemental information about certain  
pages. Then editing the documentation is just a matter of editing a  
text file, same as INSTALL.txt. But let's open another thread to talk  
about future plans. ;)

> My pet issue is that no contrib module should be mentioned in help  
> texts (I will submit an issue later if noone does before me, I am  
> just in a hurry, and unable to submit now). Location module is  
> mentioned at some point in Drupal core. Since it is a contrib  
> module to be installed, I don't think it is OK to mention it at all.

Agreed there. I did a quick grep and couldn't find reference to  
Location module, but if you find it please submit a patch to remove it.

-Angie