On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 19:18 -0700, Kevin Kubasik wrote: > * A major concern is allowing our current translation and documentation > teams to continue to work without serious interruption. Many of those > contributers are less technical, or simply have less interest in playing > around with software to figure it out ;).
With my GDP leader hat on, hacker hat off: Distributed version control could potentially help the documentation team in two ways: 1) Maintainers branch when it's convenient for them. This is often not when it's convenient for the documentation team. So, for instance, let's say that features X and Y were added to FooApp 2.20. But our writers only had time to document feature X. They continue writing documentation for feature Y after the 2.20.0 release, so that it can be included in 2.20.1. Unfortunately, the maintainers of FooApp branch right after the 2.20.0 release to implement feature Z. Now our writers need to commit feature Y documentation to two branches. Not fun. What would be preferable is if the documentation team could continue working on a single document, and branch the document when it's convenient for them. I'm not an SCM geek. I don't know the logistics of how we'd handle this exactly. But an SCM that's smarter about merges would surely help. 2) There are downstream modifications to our documentation. We would like to be able to manage these sanely. So when Ubuntu makes a User Guide update that's useful for all of Gnome, we want it. But when Ubuntu makes a change that reflects some change they made in the software, we don't want it. But we do want the Ubuntu folks to have an easy time of managing those changes for themselves. On the other hand, learning how to do all these things can be a major obstacle to potential writers. (We have other major obstacles as well, like the fact that building the latest Gnome is no cake walk.) So while it would be nice to be able to manage branches independently of developer branches, our writers shouldn't have to do all sorts of crap to make it happen. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
