-1 I don't understand why there is continued pressing that things not in a release have to be treated as if it requires the same treatment as the content of a release. I thought we had worked a high-level sketch of the user documentation case with Jean Hollis Weber some time ago on this list.
There are cross-over cases, such as authoring of what will be embedded help (in many languages) and also the support for on-line help. But even for on-line help it would be great if it could be community-augmented. All we're accomplishing here is guaranteeing that the only well-written documents and congenial forums for users will carry the LibreOffice logo. We already have two separate wikis, one that the community uses and one that requires committers to make the changes. I notice the second one is not getting much activity. I think this stance is too heavy-handed in an area where there is no demonstration of harm and a great need for community engagement. We need to be flexible here, and quickly too. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:apa...@robweir.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 05:04 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Refactoring the brand: Apache ooo + OpenOffice.org? (was re:OpenOffice.org branding) On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 10:38 PM, Jean Hollis Weber <jeanwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 21:24 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: >> I'd look at it like this: The documentation that is needed for our >> users to be successful with our product, from end users, to admins, to >> application developers, that documentation is product documentation. >> If having it deleted or defaced, without us noticing it, would cause >> our users some harm, then it is product documentation. If the right >> to copy, modify and redistribute the documentation is essentially to >> successful creating and hosting a new port or translation, or even a >> commercial derivative or an open source fork, of the project, then it >> is product documentation. > > Leaving aside for the moment all the other user-doc type items on the > wiki, and looking specifically at the existing current set of user > guides (which are in ODT/PDF format, but made available for download > from the existing OOo wiki), I'm unclear how they will fit into this. > They are not currently under the Apache license, and we would never be > able to track down all the contributors to get them to agree to the > license and/or sign the iCLA. So are we talking only about future > updates to these docs? And if so, do you mean that every future > contributor to these guides during their production must sign the iCLA? > Or just that only someone with suitable access rights (committer?) can > put them on the wiki (in ODT/PDF format)? Or something else? > I'd like us to treat documentation like we do code. Not necessarily the same tools, but the same care for provenance, accountability and quality, namely: 1) We welcome "patches" and "contributions" from anyone, but these must be first reviewed and approved by a project committer before they become part of the documentation set. Any such contributions must be made under Apache 2.0 license. 2) Only project committers have direct write access to the documentation. This requires that they first sign the iCLA. 3) All contributions, whether from the public or from committers and tracked/logged, so we can accurately determine who made a given change. So no anonymous or pseudonymous patches. A user id that we can trace to a real email address is fine. With code this works by non-committer contributors sending patches (diffs) to the mailing list, where they are merged in and reviewed by a committer, and then checked into the repository. With documentation, using a wiki , we would need a different mechanism for achieving this. Luckily there are MediaWiki extensions to enable this. I'd like to preserve the immediate nature of editing on the wiki. That is its strength. But we need to find away to also get this under project oversight as well. I think we can do both, without too much annoyance to contributors. > --Jean > > > > > >
