On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 7:48 AM, Knapp <[email protected]> wrote: > I have been working on making a video about the VSE. I thought it would be > easy but it turns out not to be because of a lot of factors including my > computer. > > To get to the point, the VSE documentation is quite bad. I know it is being > worked on by someone and I thought I would help him since I was rereading > everything anyway. But it turned out to be very hard to do. > > I thought it would be like Wikipedia, you edit it and it is done. That is > NOT the way it is. You must first be signed up. You must download a copy of > the source document code and then you must change that in a funny editors > language and then you must compile it on your computer. Then you have to > submit it as if were were writing C code. > > Guess what? I could not get it to compile on Sabayon Linux. I don't have > time to fight with it but I did ask and got a nice reply that he would just > take my ideas and do it for me. All (not the nice guy) this results in me > being VERY put off from helping with the documentation. I am sure I am not > the first to run into this big wall.
When moving to sphinx we knew the up-front effort involved would be greater, however I think you over state the complexity. You don't need an account to build the docs locally, having an account to commit is no different from needing a wiki account. The reStructuredText markup is similar complexity to MediaWiki or Phabricators remarkup. On a typical Linux system its around 5 commands install dependencies, download the manual and build it. If any of these fail its frustrating, but let us know what when wrong, likely its not hard to overcome. > I am good with computers but this was WAY too much for me to go through. > Think what it must be like for the computer phobic artists? It is just > simply to hard for the average person to bother with. It is no wonder that > the documentation is so bad. We need to do something to make this light an > easy. Agree documentation quality is very mixed - some sections are still copied from the Wiki. One of the main reasons to move *away* from the Wiki was the overall low quality and lack of quality control we had there (many half finished pages copy-pasted information between pages, drive by edits with incomplete, even misinformation). After ~5 years of having Blender 2.5+ out many wiki pages weren't updated from Blender 2.4x for example. This is re-opening discussion we had a while back: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/2014-May/004453.html New manual system is of course not above criticism, but its really a stretch to blame it for the state of documentation having migrated documentation written over ~10year time period, when the new systems been in use for over a year. > Ton said that we need someone to interface between the users and the > developers to let them know about new stuff and how it all works. This is > the job of the manual and if the manual were as great and cool as the 2.4 > manual then I think we would not need someone to do this so badly for us. > We need to improve the "new" manual a LOT. It needs to be easy to do. > > I think it would be a great idea to move to a system like Wikipedia. > > Sorry if this is not the right place to post this but I did not find > another place. > > Let's make working on the manual as easy as helping with Wikipedia! > > Thanks, > > -- > Douglas E Knapp > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers -- - Campbell _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
