On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 9:38 PM, David Nelson <li...@traduction.biz> wrote: > Hi, :-) > > Minor addition after a few hours sleep and before starting work: > > This kind of design documentation is really essential for various reasons. > > What would happen if there was some kind of disaster and we were to > lose the essential core of our lead devs for some horrible reason?
Seriously ? for a distributed open source software, _that_ is your doomsday scenario ? If that were to happen, it would probably means that your immediate problem would be survival: finding food and shelter. Computer software will be the least of our problem for few generations... > We'd be scuppered. Among the other members of the LibreOffice project, > is there anyone who knows how the thing works? Is there any record, > useable by a non-geek No amount of documentation will turn a 'non-geek' into a core dev. Clean, well written code, with the least amount of 'trick' is the best documentation: It is by definition accurate, complete and authoritative. Quality that no Documentation ever equaled no matter how much effort you put into it. >, of the state of evolution of the code base? > > We say that people are free to take the source and do what they want > with it, but - at the moment - they'd have to reverse engineer the > whole code base. How "open" is that? Reading source code is not 'reverse engineering'... That is what any software engineer do on a daily basis to maintain existing code. It is 'open' because anyone have access to the source code and therefore _can_ read it and figure out how it works (or doesn't). > > No, I apologise for insisting, and I realise that this initiative will > take some initial footwork, and will require on-going maintenance, but > it really should be considered to be essential work. > > But I firmly believe there will be a pay-off in quite a few ways. > > In any case, I'll be at the next couple of SC/BoD meetings to follow > up and discuss the idea. There is no need for that. You can find volunteers and start working on that without the blessing of anyone. It _is_ free software, and _this_ is a meritocracy. If you _do_ something in that line -- the wiki is a perfect place for you to make that work available and gather with like minded volunteers -- no-one will get in the way. What do you expect the BoD to do ? issue an Edict ? Give you a size-able budget to hire technical writer ? If your proposal attract people from the community (our even better attract new people to it) then your proposal will become reality, regardless of the BoD opinion. That is how it is supposed to work. Norbert -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to steering-discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/steering-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
