Hi Luke,
Luke Lollard via Discussion list for the GNUstep programming environment wrote:
Herein lies the beauty and value of email (and IRC) to me.
I think the same... also, not everything needs to be real-time. Actually, a lot can be deferred. Email is wonderfully deferred and is a collector of activities from different streams. Everyone wants to replace it, ultimately failing. Neatly organized in folder, it acts for me also as task-list (e.g. flagged emails, not-read emails). Everyone screams about new tool X, but then you have many projects and up having X, Y, Z... terrible. Of course, one could thing the whole software migrated to GitHub, but well, I wouldn't. rather a nigthmare, wouldn't it be?
Should contributors be working on the official website wiki, or the GitHub site? It seems that all other discussion has been about the wiki.
The Wiki seems fine for organic contributions: it is thought exactly for that, easy change, revert, collaborate within predefined templates. A website is more static and maintained by less people. I think it should be rather KISS. That's how we and other projects do and did for years and I see it fine. Where to draw the line? I think gut feeling.
I feel the Wiki is perfect for things like build instructions, screenshots news, description of apps, tools and information which points to many other projects related to gnustep. www.gnustep.org more restricted to the few official frameworks, official presentations and reference documentation specific of GNUstep itself (e.g. except some links, there is no mention of other important projects, be it GNUMail, Gershwin, GAP, GNUstep Desktop...
From time to time wonderful information distills on the WIki and I felt as it was a good idea to consolidate it on the website.
about the github site opinions differ. Some seek it as a replacement for gnustep.org. I am against that and I don't feel what is in there is up to it either. Current consensus would be it to be a documentation website, which could be a good idea for all tutorials and similar documentation of different nature that accumulated. However not for the reference documentation.
No easy answer.
Not as difficult as it was to implement the technical achievements of GNUstep; so it's possible. Sure, it's not as fun as writing the code, but it's necessary for the project to continue existing and for new developers to create software using GNUstep.
Documentation has always been an issue for Open Source projects and now even Apple documentation is by far not what it has been at the peal of 15 years ago. I loved when it was off-line, cross-linked and smooth between reference, tutorials and guides, all in the help of XCode. Hard to reach that for us. We could try to improve our Reference documentation though to cover more topics
Isn't a GitHub wiki essentially a markdown file?
Yes, essentially it is. But for tasks tracking I prefer a real tracker, e.g. issue Tracker of GitHub (or equivalent) rather than managing a file with "commits" every time.
The only value I see of using something more complex than that is if we could tag tasks by priority, assignee, status, etc., similar to the tasks already in Savannah[1] (although, it doesn't look active any more). I know GitHub has a Projects feature, but I've never used it. [1]: https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?group_id=99 [2]: https://github.com/features/issues
since we are on GitHub, we should get away from savannah (as much as I dislike that personally!). But for coherency it should be migrated somehow. E.g. all tasks reviewed except in-progress tasks which we should prioritize to close them down
Riccardo
