So after a couple months of trying to get codehaus confluence to turn over performance just is not there, and as per last weeks geotools meeting I can no longer ask ACuster to waste his time with it.
With respect to the wiki there is a stark contrast between the developers guide and the documentation available for users. I am sure in reality the developers guide is of interest to few enough people that it only has small modifications made (as project policy, dependencies and tools change). The user document is a different beast, even from early on users quickly set up code snippets to try and come to terms with the library, resulting in a bunch of examples that confuse the community as a whole. Thanks to ACuster these examples seem to now be grouped by library version. Which brings be to docbook (or back to docbook as our early documentation was in this format). Docbook (combined with XMLMind) represented an easy way to write our documentation and integrate it into the build cycle for GeoTools 2), the problem at that time was that you needed to be a developer to interact with the documentation (CVS access was required) and that when these documents fell out of sync there was often on timetable for a fix, or ability for users to help out easily. Moving to confluence was a vast improvement all around, the Developers Guide was brought up to date, the ability to collaborate on the content was improved. However this is no longer maintainable, confluence on codehaus has gotten too slow as its popularity has increased, resulting in a much more annoying editing process, and consequences like pdf export no longer working. We have also had several offers to rehost our confluence sites on a faster server, but with codehaus performance we have not been able to do an XML export and recover our documentation for a move. It seems we have lost our window of opportunity, and moving user documentation off of the site is the first consequence. On the bright side we hope to move user documentation into the build, specifically into the demo directory, and have it versioned with the code base. The difficult part is generating useful user documentation. Something I would like to see fixed before we graduate from the OSGEO incubation process. Over the last several months I have had a series of interesting conversations with ACuster, fussing over approach for user docs, breadth of coverage required and so on. We tried setting up an additional wiki space for user docs (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTDOC/Home), and it appears that Martin is under daily interrogation about the projection systems :-) I do have a few questions about confluence use, before things proceed: - ACuster: I do not think you are making use of UserGuide space at the moment? Are we going to see how/if docbook plays out first? - ACuster: You had a run at cleaning up the wiki space for user pages, is this complete for the time being? BTW: The changes to the wiki space have made a vast improvement, thanks for the breaking down the content into version specific examples and snippets. I am going to start working on my presentations(s) for FOSS4G, and would like to start a "demo/tour" module. If I understand things correctly the code would be in the public domain, for easy cut&paste by the user community. I will include some docbook commentary as the code is constructed, but am unsure what license the text would be available under. Jody ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
