> But if people don't contribute content/reviews/reorganization, nothing > happens. More tools with no one to use them won't bring anything, in > the end someone has to do the work and this is not happening ATM.
But if people don't contribute content/reviews/reorganization I see two conclusions to draw : - either no one is interested in writing documentation and Cocoon is going to die sooner or later - or those tools we are talking about are not as adapted as you find them. FTR, those existing tools we're talking about, it's a Wiki, and two mailing lists. I find that so poor compared to what we could use if there was less conservatism in here. And about the new documentation structure Upayavira and Reinhard are working on as I said before it's great and we want to use it, but it's far too low-level to make it easy to write documentation, and the most important, to make it useful. It's excellent but it's merely a core content documentation system with versioning and integration capabilities, but it doesn't deal with some important choices like what people do need as documentation, or the way we can structure it to be as useful and pedagogic as possible. I see it as being too far from the potential documentation writer and the potential Cocoon user and I already said it before : from my POV we have to work on another layer between this system and contributors/users. > Would you guys be able to at least try writing/reorganizing some docs > in the current system [1] before inventing > yet-another-potentially-doomed-new-tool? This is exactly what doesn't interest me, the only thing I find is not such a good idea in the Wiki page you quote. It's only proposed to review existing docs and make new with old. Even if it's sad to think of letting all this knowledge aside, are you interested in such a task yourself, I mean reading all those disparate and heterogeous documents again, trying to update them, to tune them up, to change the place of commas. I'm not. And I guess few people like that kind of boring work. > Excuse the tone and don't get me wrong, I'm trying to be constructive: > building on the work of others might get you to destination earlier. You know what. You're harsch, let me be myself once and for all. I'm sick of this conservatism. I'm sick of this pessimism. And I really don't find it suprising that other initiatives proved to be "yet-another-potentially-doomed-new-tool" if you guys give the same welcoming message to all of them. > My impression is that you've dismissed the existing stuff a bit early > without really trying it. Writing/reorganizing docs is really easy > with the 2.2 docs system, and if non-commitership is a problem there's > certainly a way to solve it. You've got to be kidding me. WDYT ? Of course I've tried it and so what ?! You know, I'm not keen on working for nothing and reinventing the wheel. But... If I write some document tomorrow, how can I tag it for reviewing, how do I get comments about it, how do I manage different versions of it before to publish and commit it in the repository ? And how can I discuss with other contributors and users to know if the documentation I'm about to write is really needed ? No way ! At least no easy way, no "community-fashion" way ! > Let us know if you have any questions or specific problems about how to > write docs for the 2.2 trunk. I've got a few yeah. What if I don't want to be forced to install Forrest locally ? What if I want to check if a special topic has already been documented or not ? What if I find the wiki pages you quote so messy that it discourages me to work on things ? I mean I'm ready to adapt myself, I know how to use all those tools, I've got used to work things out in order to understand a few things about Cocoon. But is everybody ready to do so ? I don't think so. The truth is Reinhard is right : writing mails takes time, writing wiki (and accidentally crashing your browser and lose everything you've done in the last few hours because you didn't want to notify people every time you changed a paragraph) takes time. Checking out some forrest stuff takes time. Everything in what you suggest takes time, it takes far too much time to be really interesting to use. And once again if I were wrong, there would be more enthusiasm for them right now. But there is not, so what does it mean for you ? I'll tell you what. We are some Cocoon users to share the same concerns and to try to have "modern" ideas about the way we would like Cocoon documentation to be. And hopefully we have support from other Cocoon committers and we managed to come out with a few interesting things today. And I hope we will be able to get other constructive and optimistic and modern ideas. And if you guys don't like it, nevermind, then I won't try to convince you and try totake part in other projects, and it will be my turn to be pessimistic about the future of Cocoon community. I'm sorry for this "sensitive" message but once is OK, twice becomes annoying, three times at 3:00 in the morning tends to get me a little bit on my nerves. So I sincerely hope this won't be the last message in that thread and that other will come to drive the initial idea back on rails : how can we communicate a positive and modern image to potential Cocoon users through a unique, coherent, communicative and open documentation community. Best regards and keep up the good work. -- Sebastien ARBOGAST
