2009/2/9 Shaun McCance <[email protected]>: > On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 10:16 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote: >> - Are we just waiting for some corporate sponsors to pick up the docs >> where Sun left them many years ago ? > > Corporate contributions to the documentation team would be > welcome, but picking them up the way Sun did is a band-aid > that will inevitably lead us back where we are right now. > > The Sun writers did a lot for our documentation, but they > weren't very active in the community. When they owned a > document, they updated it without community involvement. > This left us with almost no volunteers who could pick up > the slack when Sun dropped out. > >> - Is there anything that can be done, short of transmutating hackers >> into technical writers at next guadec with the help of poisoned beer ? > > Steps that would help: > > 1) Make it easier to run the latest development version. I got > myself set up for working on 2.25 documentation yesterday, in > part to review your patches. It took me most of the day Sunday > just to get 2.25 in front of me. And I'm a programmer. Most > potential writers are not. > > 2) Provide better documentation for how to write documentation. > The GDP Handbook is outdated and overwhelming.
Quite true, as a matter of fact, I've been trying to learn how to write documentation in the latests weeks. I know nothing about docbook and I like to consider myself sort of a computer literate, and I'm telling you, my frustration could be used as a reusable source of energy to power up a whole country at this point. Why on earth is so hard to learn to create a document with a few paragraphs and illustrations? > 3) Make documentation easier to write. Mallard can help. > 4) Make it easier to see what documentation needs work. Pulse > can help. What is Pulse? What is Mallard? How can they help? I've been thinking how hard would it be to have a very basic webkit based editor that would convert the html it generates into docbook? Really, good documentation writers are most likely people with no skills on SVN/DVCS/Docbook/XML whatsoever. We should provide a focused editor supporting the very basic stuff to write a good GNOME document. -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
