[...]
>> Yes, but ... if something is submitted  and then the maintainer can't
>> continue and noone else wants to do anything on it, what does the
>> project do?  Since it was part of the project people started using it
>> and will be unhappy (or outright and volubly cranky) if it is removed
>> because it has bit rotted and isn't compatible with the current
>> asciidoc.
>
>
> I think the definition of what is "part of" a project is evolving. I can
> only speak from experience.
>

I think the difference is your experience is in web stuff, where
everything is dynamic and online, mine is in thingspace where code and
docs need to also go offline, code in standalone machines and docs
even in dead tree format :)

> In the Arquillian "organization" on github, we have a few modules / add-ons
> that have been idle for awhile. The commit history tells the story that the
> people need to know...when it was last updated and by whom, and if there are

Which is fine if your customers are developers, they can be expected
to understand such things, but Asciidoc is used by lots of
non-developers, and they don't see or understand such subtleties.

In fact my experience on Geany (an IDE, and therefore the users are
mostly developers of some type) is that the same is often true for
developers too :(


> any pull requests open. If the visitor wants to see it active again, they
> are empowered to send a pull request (or ping on an existing one). That
> could trigger a variety of activity. If it doesn't, the visitor can escalate
> to the mailinglist to plead for someone to attend to it or to make them the
> new maintainer. If all those options fail, they can just start promoting
> their own fork...and as a community we could decide how to go from there.

And again Asciidoc non-developers *can't* do that by themselves.

>
> In essence, I'm saying that rather than us (on behalf of the AsciiDoc
> project) saying that some add-on is sanctioned, we let the facts (commits)
> speak for themselves. I've never had anyone come to me and say that they
> were mad because an add-on to Arquillian has become idle. If they were mad,
> they could fix it themselves. That's open source just doing what open source
> does best.

Geany has been forced to deprecate and remove several plugins when
they became incompatible due to lack of maintenance, and that got some
howls :)

If plugins are suitably important and suitable quality then maybe they
can be taken under the project wing, so long as it gets some more
developers beyond Stuart.  I don't have guaranteed time to do more
than answer stuff on the ML.

It is very important for something like Asciidoc which is very mature
and needs to maintain backward compatibility so that archived
documents can continue to be processed.  Plugins that a document needs
must be as stable and backward compatible as the base application.
[...]
>> Well, thats the point of a wiki, it doesn't take Stuart or a Github
>> committer to update anything.  The only manual part is registering the
>> user (to keep out bots and defacers) and that only happens once.
>
>
> I realized when I read your response that I was thinking one thing and
> typing another. I meant to say that it *should* be a wiki page rather than a
> file managed by a single person. It's when the responsibility falls on a
> single person's shoulders that it cannot be scalable. So ignore what I said
> and +1 to the wiki page listing these add-ons.

That better, I was somewhat perplexed by the original reply :)

>
> For what it's worth, we could add a disclaimer that we don't sanction the
> extensions, we are just listing them to make people informed. I think they
> become "sanctioned" when they become part of the AsciiDoc distribution. But
> remember, this is all just community-supported, so I'm using "sanctioned"
> very loosely here.

Sure the protected front page of the wiki should have all the boilerplate etc.

>
>>
>>
>>  Better is the
>> > auto-discoverability approach, where it's easy to find things because
>> > the
>> > network links them organically. That's precisely how GitHub ends up
>> > being
>> > used.
>>
>> So any repos on github (or anywhere else for that matter) can be
>> linked from the one place, but when the developer of the addon is
>> ready, and not when it is half baked (how to turn people off).
>
>
> Absolutely...we don't just pull in code without reviewing what state it is
> in first. For instance, take my bootstrap-docs backend. That is still very
> much a prototype and I wouldn't expect that to be put under the asciidoc
> organization yet. Once it's been vetted a bit more and users start giving it
> the thumbs up, then it would be time to "promote" it to the organization to
> get more visibility (and to be more useful to community).
>

Yes, that has always been a problem, how to gain maturity without
exposing too many users to underdeveloped code.

>>
>>
>> Also the wiki is useful for user acquired experience that is related
>> to, but not directly asciidoc, eg how to beat dblatex and fop into
>> line :)  At the moment the FAQs are the repository of that knowledge
>> and require website maintainer effort.
>
>
> +1
>
> Having worked with the JDF team to create their docs in AsciiDoc, I know
> they accumulated a number of tips to share. Having a wiki for that
> information would be great!
>
> I happen to like the wiki on GitHub because it is, itself, a git repository
> and the documents can be written in AsciiDoc. That seems to be right in our
> direction...and there is no lock-in since the wiki can easily be migrated
> somewhere else.

Havn't used the ones in github, but it appears that it only works
locally, thats not too good for non-developers submissions.  Needs to
use git, have ruby, and doesn't work on windows.  It should be able to
be editied with an online editor so there are no requirements on the
client except a browser.

Cheers
Lex

>
> -Dan
>
> --
> Dan Allen
> Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action
> Registered Linux User #231597
>
> http://google.com/profiles/dan.j.allen
> http://mojavelinux.com
> http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction
>
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