The Debian Documentation Project stores its web pages and much of the manual text on the Debian Subversion server at svn.debian.org. svn.debian.org is part of the Gforge installation on alioth.debian.org. Please read the Alioth documentation for more information about how this service works.
Everybody can download the sources from the SVN server. Only members of the Debian Documentation Project can update files.
You can use a web interface to access the files individually and see changes to them at http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/ddp/manuals/trunk
For downloading an entire manual, direct access to the SVN server is often a better option. You need the subversion package on your own machine.
Use this command to download all the files:
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/ddp/manuals/trunk manuals
This will recursively create the directories and populate them.
To update your local copy with any changes made by other people, enter the manuals directory and run the command:
svn update
Before accessing the SVN server using this method you have to be granted write access to it first. Please read how to request update permission first.
Use this command to download all the files:
svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/ddp/manuals/trunk manuals
This will recursively create the directories and populate them.
To update your local copy with any changes made by other people, enter the manuals directory and run the command:
svn update
Update privileges are available to anyone who wishes to participate in writing the manuals. We generally request that you have submitted a couple of useful patches first.
To obtain update privileges, you need to send a request to the
Debian documentation
mailing list. Please explain why you need access. Please indicate
your Alioth login name.
Once your request is approved, you'll be part of the ddp
project (and
Unix group) on Alioth.
The published web pages of the manual text are generated by a cron job run on www-master.debian.org every day sometime after 15:39 Pacific time.
The script does a svn update, and then make -C manuals clean publish.
The makefile is set up to rebuild each subdirectory (that contains
maintained documentation), and to install the files from each subdirectory
in doc/manuals/ subdirectory of the web site. The subdirectory
makefiles are derived from manuals/standard.makefile.
The documentation files generated by the update script can be found at http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/.
The log files generated by the update script can be found at http://www-master.debian.org/build-logs/ddp/