Joshua Saddler wrote:
On Sat, 3 Oct 2009 20:45:21 +0300 Markos Chandras
<hwoar...@gentoo.org> wrote:
This is actually true. Maybe all devs should have access on docs
since the docs teams are dead. I would suggest to let all
developers contribute to documentation whether they belong to docs
team or not
No. Many (most?) devs do not write good documentation.
> <snip>
They don't know all the myriad documents that need editing to
pick up the change made to one part of a different document.
They say that the enemy of the great is the good, but I think that in
this case the enemy of the good is the great. Since many devs can't
write excellent documentation the argument is that they shouldn't be
permitted to write any documentation.
The problem with this is that some of our official documentation is just
outright wrong. Right now if somebody follows the docs they are
guaranteed to end up with a non-functional system. Suppose a dev edits
those docs and fixes the version but doesn't completely clean up the
accompanying text or misses some obscure cross-reference. Well, maybe
now a user has a 50% chance of getting it wrong - which is better than a
100% chance of getting it wrong. Others can then clean it up (such as
the folks on the forums who get all kinds of feedback about these sorts
of issues).
I'd be the first to agree that it would be better to just file a bug and
let the doc team clean up the docs. Perhaps this situation is just an
anomoly, in which case we shouldn't be changing overall policy as a
result. However, if we have a resource bottleneck here then we need to
do something to help clear it up. That isn't meant to reflect poorly on
anybody who is contributing to docs - you might be doing a wonderful job
but unless we can find more of you then you're going to be playing
whack-a-mole.
The amd64 team ran into a similar issue which is why there is a policy
that package maintainers are trusted to stabilize their own packages as
long as they've tested them on the platform. That doesn't mean that
there aren't decent amd64 team members - only that there simply aren't
enough of us to keep up with everything.
