Should the workbench package a static User Guide?

[davemfish]

Or is it okay to link to an online version? Right now we link to the lastest UG build on our releases bucket, but it's also possible to link to a specific version, whether it is local or online.

[dcdenu4]

I think it makes sense to point to the latest version, since our current UG workflow has us updating the doc with changes that would apply to the latest release of InVEST. I think it would be a nice option to have the UG locally, knowing that the local version could get out of sync with the latest version (this is how it currently is with InVEST).

[davemfish]

@emlys , @phargogh @dcdenu4 should we revisit this question before the release? Right now we're still not packing a static UG with the workbench.

[dcdenu4]

Oh interesting, I think during our chat in the Software Call some of us were assuming it was. I think that discussion was around knowing which version of InVEST corresponds to which version of the UG.

How much of a lift would this be @davemfish to include the html pages locally, maybe via the About menu or something?

[davemfish]

Each model tab has a link to its UG. So I think we would point that to the local html instead of the remote URL. It seems best to go with one or the other rather than having UI links to both the static and remote/latest versions in different places. That would be confusing the for user, I think. So is it debatable which version is best to provide?

Also need to configure electron builder to include the files as extra resources. And make sure our Workbench build step depends on the UG build step.

[phargogh]

From my perspective, I think it'd be useful to continue to distribute the documentation for the version that people are using. We've had offline access to InVEST for a long time, so I think we should provide some documentation along with that.

I asked Tong how CAS uses the InVEST UG, and they host their own copy somewhere on their servers to avoid the firewall, and users also use the local copies of the docs that come with InVEST. So if we're linking to our own online hosted documentation from the workbench, there's an extra step people would need to go through (changing the URL to the CAS-hosted one) in order to get to the docs. Local documentation gets around the whole issue.

[davemfish]

I agree with the reasons to package the UG. Related to #1102 , should we package all the available language versions? It looks like they are <10MB each, so maybe we should?

[davemfish]

Yes, we should package all language versions

[phargogh]

Closed in #1244