Hi all, In the beginning of the year, I have posted the "New Year Goals" for the Gentoo Documentation Project [1], listing a few bigger topics we would like to address in this year.
Now that we are half-way, I would like to inform you about the progress the GDP has made since then. For your reference, you can find the New Year Goals in the GDP Status Update, dated March 7th [2], but I will relist them here with information on their advancements. ** Pull in developers/contributors Before randomly starting to pull in users who want to join the GDP, we have crafted a guideline on how we recruit developers [3]. This guideline includes numbers on how we (Xavier and I) look at contributors before we deem them active enough to be part of the project. It also includes a Quiz that each contributor has to fill in succesfully. With this guideline in place, we have already invited a few contributors to join the GDP crew. Some of them are lead translators, non-x86 architectural documentation developers (MIPS, AMD64, PPC) and others are English Documentation Editors and reviewers. Others are in the pipeline for joining. We are however still looking for internal developers who want to join the GDP team to help their project deliver quality documentation. Internal, because they need to have a good knowledge of the project in their hands. This is however no hard-written rule: if you are known to the project but no Gentoo developer, that is of course good as well, but we do want the acknowledgement from the project. ** Reintroduce Status Updates Until this day I have not reintroduced status updates (the request on all documentation editors to submit personal status updates) since the team is currently working well (we have a good bug squashing rithm) and there is no direct need to duplicate what we already know of each other on the mailinglist. However, when the project would become too large to handle directly, indirect status updates will be introduced. But again, for the time being, this has not been found necessary. ** Improve documentation on GuideXML The idea here was to document the use of the various tags better (/why/ do we have an <abstract> tag, where is it used, etc.). With the Quiz in mind, this has been put back a bit as the Quiz directly asks each contributor for all this information. Putting it all in a single document would defeat the idea of the quiz a bit (since every body would be able to copy/paste everything). ** "Writing Style" documentation The entire Gentoo Documentation Repository is written by various individuals. This gives a cluttered idea on the writing style involved in the documents. We have not received any (negative) feedback about this, but we do feel that some common writing styles should be introduced. There is no proposal on a writing style yet, though, so see this as still being "Planned". ** Define Location of Documentation Most projects put project-specific documentation on their project page. For the GDP, as long as this documentation does not affect the broad user base, this is just fine. Projects should know however that this documentation is less likely to be reviewed by the GDP or translated. Whenever a document can be of interest for a larger population, we feel that the document must reside under http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en, which is the GDPs play ground. Not only does this improve the quality of the documentation, but it also improves the visibility of the document to the wider audience. ** Audit the Existing Documentation Auditing is of course a work that's always in progress. We have recently decided to rewrite the ALSA Guide [4] as it was getting too cluttered with patches here and there to fix things that are obsoleted or renewed. Other documentation is being audited or worked on. If you find anything outdated or in need of an update, bug [5] us. ** More USE-case Documentation With USE-case documentation we mean documents that cover multiple subjects simultaneously. Documents such as the LDAP Howto [6], the UTF-8 Guide [7], Mailfilter Guide [8] and others are good examples. Such documents contain information that is more difficult to find elsewhere. However, we have seen that the community appreciates the configuration guides (Xorg, KDE, GNOME, fluxbox, ...) a lot as they are frequently referenced in #gentoo, on the mailinglists and on the Gentoo Forums, so the urge to go for USE-case documentation has decreased a bit in favor of the latter. If you have questions about other activities within the Gentoo Documentation Project, proposals or feedback, do not hesitate to reply or contact me personally at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or SwifT on irc.freenode.net. Wkr, Sven Vermeulen [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp/status/status_20050307.xml [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp/doc/doc-policy.xml#doc_chap4 [4] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml [5] http://bugs.gentoo.org [6] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ldap-howto.xml [7] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/utf-8.xml [8] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/mailfilter-guide.xml -- Documentation project leader - Gentoo Foundation Trustee The Gentoo Project <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>
pgp7T2rfKREho.pgp
Description: PGP signature
