Automating publishing

This page tracks progress towards implementing a fully automated publishing process for the Fedora Documentation Project.

Background

Formal Fedora documentation is authored in DocBook XML and transformed into multi-page HTML, single-page HTML, PDF, and EPUB by our publishing tool, Publican. Publican also maintains the Fedora documentation site (docs.fedoraproject.org) and automatically generates and updates the navigation menus in each language.

At present, the entire documentation suite hosted at http://docs.fedoraproject.org resides in a Git repository to which certain members of the Documentation Project (members of the docs-publishers group) commit changes. The webserver publishes whatever is in that repo.

This is a vast improvement over our previous process, but Publican includes features that make publishing even easier and more robust, since Publican is designed to package documentation in RPM packages to install on a webserver. Chapter 6 of the Publican Users' Guide provides an overview of the mechanism.

Important -- note that since the webserver runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the documentation packages need to be built for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Publican is also designed to build documentation to install for desktop use, but this is a separate set of considerations and not the aim here.

Steps to automate publishing

Install Publican 4.0 on the webserver

The version of Publican shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is very old (2.1) and lacks many bug fixes and enhancements that have been added since then (current upstream is 4.0, due in Fedora in the next few weeks).

Some of the Publican 4.0 deps in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are too old or not available on all arches; we will need to build these for el6-docs

It's also possible that Publican 4.0 has dependencies that are not in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6; at all. If so, we will need to add these to EPEL.

To install Publican 4.0 on the webserver, we need to

• get a new el6-docs build root -- rel-eng request here Done! Thanks ausil!
• identify and build any dependencies not in el6 for EPEL
• identify and build any dependencies too old or not on all arches in el6 for el6-docs.
• build Publican 4.0 and the Fedora brand package for el6-docs.

Dependencies not in el6

• wkhtmltopdf
  • wkhtmltopdf-qt
• perl-DateTime-Format-DateParse
• perl-Locale-Msgfmt (branch requested for EPEL)
• perl-Lingua-EN-Fathom (coming in EPEL)
• perl-XML-Catalog (for XML::TreeBuilder, coming in EPEL)
• perl-IO-Compress
  • perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2
  • perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib

Dependencies to update in el6

• perl-HTML-Tree -- too old
  • perl-XML-TreeBuilder -- too old
• docbook5-style-xsl -- too old
• perl-Archive-Tar -- too old
• perl-Syntax-Highlight-Engine-Kate -- too old
  • perl-Test-Differences (for Syntax-Highlighting-Kate) -- too old

Update the Fedora brand

The Fedora brand needs some minor updates to make it Publican 4 ready. Probably just book titles in HTML, and renaming a CSS file for the -web subpackage.

• needs fonts-overpass to go stable in EPEL (requested)

Configure an Publican-generated website on the webserver

Publican can automatically generate its own website structure on the server. This consists of:

• a configuration file at /etc/publican-website.cfg
• an SQLite database at /var/lib/publican/publican-website.db
• the /var/www/html/docs directory in which Publican publishes documentation

Set up webserver for automatic updates

The webserver should check the el6-docs repo on a cronjob to look for new, updated, or deleted packages. Rudi can supply a script for this.

Build the docs packages

As a team, we would need to build all the docs packages in Koji. I think as long as we do all packages for F19 and F20, we can proceed to the next step (cutover) and gradually rebuild our legacy docs over a longer period of time.

Cutover

When the documentation for currently maintained versions (F19 and F20) has all been rebuilt, we request that Infra points

docs.fedoraproject.org to /var/www/html/docs on the server.

Contents of el6-docs

As a footnote, these are the packages we are carrying in el6-docs. Ones marked in bold can (and should) be carried in EPEL itself -- we're working on this!

• docbook-style-xsl-1.78.1-2.el6
• perl-HTML-FormatText-WithLinks-0.14-9.el6
• perl-HTML-FormatText-WithLinks-AndTables-0.02-5.el6
• wkhtmltopdf-qt-4.8.0-6.git20111107.el6
• wkhtmltopdf-0.10.0_rc2-8.el6
• perl-HTML-Tree-4.2-1.el6
• perl-Locale-Msgfmt-0.15-9.el6
• docbook5-style-xsl-1.78.1-2.el6
• perl-Archive-Tar-1.92-4.el6
• perl-XML-TreeBuilder-5.1-0.el6
• perl-Test-Differences-0.5000-11.el6
• perl-Syntax-Highlight-Engine-Kate-0.08-4.el6
• perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2-2.062-2.el6
• perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.062-2.el6
• perl-IO-Compress-2.062-2.15.el6
• publican-4.0.0-0.el6