Hi List!
Again, sending this to the dev list, as the doc list seems to be dead!
The Ethereal User's Guide wasn't updated for more than two years right
now and I've changed lot's of things in the Ethereal GUI code since
then, so the guide is pretty outdated.
After more than a week of *very hard* work (I don't like writing
documentation), I've finished a reviewable state of an updated Ethereal
User's Guide!
Following are the steps I've done so far and why I did them:
-converted the existing user guide from Docbook/SGML to Docbook/XML (by
hand)
As the XML variant of docbook is becoming state of the art since the
last editing of the guide. I've done this by hand (took about an hour),
as the conversion tools I've found didn't do a great job, they tumbled
the identing around.
-renewed *all* screenshot, using win32 GTK2.4 with png as the file format
the screenshots were outdated. png is smaller and provides better
quality than jpg for screenhots, gif is still patented. All modern
browsers should work with png (except lynx ;-)
-updated the content, as far as my knowledge goes (missing some things
like the Unix specific parts and filter string syntax)
Well, it was the time to do it.
-restructured the content to improve understanding and readability
The structure of the guide was a bit unhappy IMHO, I tried to change it
to a better understandable structure, again IMHO.
However, there are still left some minor things, which needs some
clarification/update and of course the document has to be reviewed.
I'm currently thinking about where the files should reside in CVS, because:
-as *all* filenames changed (.sgml to .xml and .jpg to .png) compared to
the current ethereal-doc, it doesn't matter to put it to a different
place than before
-in the mid-term, I'm thinking about including the user-guide into
Ethereal as the online help, replacing the very crude current online
help system I've introduced some time ago
What about checking the files into the main Ethereal CVS tree? It might
be an idea to put them into the help dir of the program, so we can
remove the currently existing files in that dir later, when we have on
online help system based on HTML.
What do others think?
Regards, ULFL
