On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 03:11:20PM -0400, Rich Bowen wrote: > I periodically give a presentation on documentation - how to make your > docs not suck, how to work with users to solve their problems, how to > make it easier for people to contribute to the docs. > Is this something that can be found online?
> I often give advice that we are not following in this docs project. Some > of these are historical (I strongly encourage people to avoid formats > like docbook that have a towering barrier to entry) but others are just > laziness and lack of time. For example, implementing the comment system > was something that I recommended, and Humbedooh implemented, but we're > not leveraging to its full potential just because there are *thousands* > of comments, and it takes time to get through them all. > Yeah, having a comment system and abandoning it is probably worse than not having one. Is there a way to clean out "misplaced" comments and stuff that's been incorporated in the docs? > Anyways, I recently tried to contribute a docs patch to another Apache > project, and ended up giving up in frustration, because I couldn't > figure out how to do it, and didn't want to have to join a bunch of > mailing lists just to fix a typo. In the process, I started wondering > how hard it is to submit a patch to the httpd docs. If, say, I found a > typo, what do I do? > I don't think we should do anything for other projects, but in our case the comment system seems like a pretty darn obvious way. It doesn't really get any easier than that. > (Contrariwise, I was able to submit a patch to the Mesos docs with very > little work, because they not only made it obvious where to do it, but > were also polite and helpful when I did it wrong the first time.) > Our page could probably do with a bit of an update, but now that I look at it I don't think it's too horrible. There's pretty much all you need to know. > Something that I recommend in my presentation is simple - tell me in the > doc how to edit/patch the doc. For example, on my work website - > http://rdoproject.org/ - you'll see an "edit on github" banner on every > page. Simple and easy. > A page source link pointing to the relevant file in svn? I suppose you could do that. > For our docs, I'd like to have something on each page of the docs that > indicates how one might patch the docs. This could simply be a link to > http://httpd.apache.org/docs-project/ or it could be a link to the > ticketing system. Patching our docs is, unfortunately, rather more > complicated than just a link to Github, but any barrier that we can > remove would be good. > Given the commenting system, I don't know how badly we need to add more links. If anything, I'd much rather have it go to http://httpd.apache.org/docs-project/ than to bugzilla. > Any objections to my making a change to that effect to the docs build > template? > See above :) vh Mads Toftum -- http://flickr.com/photos/q42/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: docs-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: docs-h...@httpd.apache.org
