Matthew,
All of BRL-CAD development, including the website, is developed under
a meritocracy. Basically we all work on various things that are of
interest and come to consensus agreement unless there is a specific
issue requiring intervention. Those who constructively contribute,
frequently interact, and remain highly involved have more say than
those who do not. This generally empowers contributors to work
towards the best interests of the project unhindered as long as
they're persistently and openly communicating with others WHILE they
work (not just when they're "done" with something).
So, to answer your question, everyone who has contributed more than
you is "in charge" but things don't work that way in practice. If
someone steps up to work on a project, nobody is generally going to
stop them unless the project is outside of scope, affects usability,
will be a maintenance burden, or changes a public interface.
Working on a round-trip documentation interface is something that
we've been working towards for several years, but the goal is a bit
tricky. We want the power of revision-controlled documents checked
into a repository with the accessibility of a wiki, and the ability
to edit on either end.
Getting our documentation into a structured format -- Doxbook/XML --
has provided tracking, integration, and validation of our
documentation with easy export to a variety of formats. Several
contributors have been working on converting our existing
documentation (which is in a myriad of formats). This has been going
great for some ... but writing XML, getting access and committing to
an SVN repository, and setting up an XML toolchain is not exactly
what I'd call "accessible".
The idea is to provide some mechanism that allows our documentation
to get published/presented to the web, but in an editable format. As
our web infrastructure is built on Mediawiki and Drupal, the natural
direction becomes a plugin in either one of those systems. The hard
part is then how to manage "editing fragments" that compose various
larger works and the conversion to/from Docbook if an alternate
format is presented (e.g., wikitext markup).
Even if the web-editing user were presented with the raw Docbook/XML
(instead of wikitext) but could then see validation errors and/or see
their result rendered on-line, we would have a very useful round-trip
online editing capability. Developers would be able to edit the
Docbook directly in the repository and push changes to the website.
External web users would be able to see our documentation, make minor
edits quickly (even anonymously), and have those changes persist to
the repository.
Cheers!
Sean
On Feb 18, 2010, at 9:33 AM, Matthew Ayres wrote:
Sean, all
Glad to be here, then! I'd be more than happy to do some work on
the website, though I'd like to know who is in charge of it, of
course.
The round-trip documentation interface does sound interesting.
More detail would certainly be welcome.
-Matthew
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 6:00 AM, Sean Morrison
<[email protected]> wrote:
Message body follows:
Matthew,
With a system as large and complex as BRL-CAD, there are ways just
about anyone can contribute in very effective ways. That said, you
seemingly understate your capacity to do something useful from the
look of the skills you list.
I'd recommend getting started on something that leverages your
current skills, as there will be plenty about BRL-CAD that will take
a while to get familiarized with no matter what you work on. From
what you list, this is perhaps something related to website
development.
Our website has much room for improvement, obviously, so there is
plenty you can work on from basic aesthetic redesign to a specific
programming project. One programming project that comes to mind
that
would have a big impact is working on a round-trip documentation
interface. If that sounds interesting, I can go into more detail.
That said, there are plenty of other ideas that come to mind as well.
Feel free to join the brlcad-devel developer's mailing list and/or
our IRC channel.
Cheers!
Sean
cc brlcad-devel
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