Re: Angband documentation project

I've talked to other-Andrew via email about this, and I hope I judge the
tone of this post right.

I was planning to convert Leon Marrick's helpfiles to HTML format for
3.0.9 (i.e. the release after next), and have already started on it.
Given that my plans involve making the help external HTML files (with
perhaps a PDF version), and leaving only a skeleton [1], the idea of
re-importing the files into the game isn't so useful for me.

However, I would very much like someone (or a couple of someones) to
volunteer to keep the documentation up-to-date, and possibly help with
the conversion, though Antony Sidwell says he might be able to do the
majority automatically.

Using a wiki isn't that great for this, though (somewhat annoyingly)
because wikis don't produce particularly pleasant HTML output. I'd thus
much rather have people who can edit plain HTML do the job.

The FAQ (and the Variant FAQ) may be a suitable candidate for wiki
treatment, though. It may also be better if someone wants to maintain a
variant listing to use the roguebasin variant listing wiki [2], or to
try and get in touch with Robert and see what is or is not happening
with Thangorodrim.

On the licence, for what it's worth: I think something like the Creative
Commons Attribution licence would be just fine. The GFDL seems
unnecessarily restrictive for the work being done. It does depend what
the documentation is currently distributed as, though -- Leon's
helpfiles are probably GPL, though that's not really that appropriate
for texts. Leon: what's the situation with your documentation? Can we
licence it under something like CC-Attribution, or the BSD? (I'd
suggest Public Domain, except you declare things PD that in various
parts of the world.)

When it comes to spoilers, and the FAQ, things may be different. I
don't really know much about the documentation at present.


[1] Command listings, possibly spoilers.
[2]
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=List_of_Angband_variants

Andrew Sidwell
--
http://angband.rogueforge.net/ -- the new home of Angband
http://entai.co.uk/projects/angband/opensource -- the GPL initiative

My email address changes monthly, and is the first three letters of the
month (in English), followed by the last two digits of the current year,
@entai.co.uk.
.

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