Update docs/README.md to reflect the current state of the world.

Fixes #1050.
This commit is contained in:
Tim Abbott
2016-06-16 09:25:30 -07:00
parent 007eee6061
commit 07abfc189b

View File

@@ -1,23 +1,25 @@
These docs are written in rST, and are included on the zulip.org website
as well as on each development installation. Many of these docs
have been ported from the internal docs of Zulip Inc.,
and may need to be updated for use in the open source project.
These docs are written in [Commonmark
Markdown](http://commonmark.org/) with a small bit of rST. We've
chosen Markdown because it is [easy to
write](http://commonmark.org/help). The docs are served in production
at [zulip.readthedocs.io](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
To generate HTML docs locally from rST:
If you want to build the documentation locally (e.g. to test your
changes), the dependencies are automatically installed as part of
Zulip development environment provisioning, and you can build the
documentation using:
* `pip install sphinx`
* In this directory, `make html`. Output appears in a `_build/html` subdirectory.
```
cd docs/
make html
```
To create rST from MediaWiki input:
* Use `pandoc -r mediawiki -w rst` on MediaWiki source.
* Use unescape.py to remove any leftover HTML entities (often inside <pre>
tags and the like).
We can use pandoc to translate mediawiki into reStructuredText, but some things need fixing up:
* Add page titles.
* Review pages for formatting (especially inline code chunks) and content.
* Fix wiki links?
* Add pages to the table of contents (`index.rst`).
You can also usually test your changes by pushing a branch to GitHub
and looking at the content on the GitHub web UI, since GitHub renders
Markdown.
When editing the dependencies for the Zulip documentation, you'll want
to edit both the root requirements.txt as well as
`docs/requirements.readthedocs.txt` (which is used by ReadTheDocs to
build the documentation quickly, without installing all of Zulip's
dependencies).