On 1/24/06, David M Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Anybody can find out by using the Compare Document feature of Open > Office to compare the two versions in SVN, it shows every single diff > and even shows diffs within a single line. Try it.
So does SVN. More importantly, the repository also pushes the changes to text files out to each and every volunteer, without having to go through a special routine, so that everyone can peer-review changes to the product in real time. Of course, the real problem here is not the notion of an editor, but the file format used by this editor. If the Open Office product stored it's file in a human-friendly XML format, then we wouldn't have a problem. If the editor did do such a thing, I'm sure thousands of open source projects would rush to use it. > Are you also volunteering to maintain the document and update it in > step with our monthly releases after it's been converted? Sure, I will continue to help. I will continue to help regardless of what format the project uses, just as I have already done. Though, my point is that we want to encourage the documentation to be a shared responsiblity, not one tech writer's burden. Everyone should be trying to keep the documentation in synch with the code changes in real time, not as an afterthought. In my experience, something that does help keep code and documentation in synch is for all the changes to go down a single pipe. In most (or all) other ASF projects, the documentation changes and the source code changes are all reported to everyone via the SVN change log emails. Once SVN, the wiki, and the issue tracker are all configured to send change logs to the list, we have one place where we can review *everything* that happens within a project. Every single thing. And we do not have to go to it, it comes to us. -Ted.
