On Sun, 2010-12-19 at 14:43 -0600, David Boyes wrote: > (Late response -- it's been a busy month) > > We tried this over in the tn3270e working group, and it didn't work so
With gerrit, or some other tool? > well. The comment chains became very unwieldy very quickly -- especially > if the points that needed discussion were complex. We eventually dropped > back to mail to resolve the complex issues, and pretty much determined > that gerrit was a fine tool for code and structured stuff, but didn't > really lend itself well to human-oriented texts. My experience as a WG chair and participant has led me to the conclusion that issue _tracking_ can be useful for large documents with lots of issues, but for less complex documents with fewer issues, it's not much better than maintaining a flat file and good communication with document authors and the working group. I've never found such tools particularly valuable for _discussion_ of a document. There have certainly been times when it would have been nice to have an easy way to find all of the discussion on an issue, but an issue tracker wouldn't help with that unless someone is religious about copying in all mailing list discussion. > So, just a field experience with it, FWIW. Interesting experiment, but I > don't think it'll really help. We'd need a serious collaborative writing > tool with versioning to start doing joint composition or editing tasks. > Framemaker has some of what we'd need, but it's bloody expensive and a > PITA to learn how to use. Not probably worth it. I think joint composition involving direct editing by a large group is generally more trouble than its worth. For a large, complex document, having a good editor (or a couple, working together) is critical. In those cases, choice of editing tools of course lies with the editor(s). In any case, I wasn't aware one could even still get Framemaker; I thought it had disappeared many years ago. > Let's stick to plain text. Easier for everyone. Agreed. _______________________________________________ AFS3-standardization mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/afs3-standardization
