as a general reply to this thread. first of all I'll like to thanks the docs team for their work, in fact I'm part of it and I'm the first one that needs to give more help here, and I believe I'm the only one(from the docs team), that still has access write access to the old trac docs, and I'm the first one that needs to be complain about because I haven't deleted a single spam comment and I haven't contributed much since the migration to moinmoin, partly because I haven't found much time to learn rest, in fact I'm starting to hate ReST since wiki is so great and beautiful. and I deserve to be taken out of the list of contributors every time they are mention.
That being said I have been doing a much dirty work in the background and is keeping trac in a sane state, and based on that I can tell you that stopping any development is stupid most tickets on trac are bugfixes that need to be worked on and if we do have a lack of people writting docs we have a bigger lack of people commenting and fixing bugs (irronically we still have lots of people reporting new ones) and every time I pull up a list of tickets that need input most of the replies are in the line of "hey check this one too", now don't get me wrong a lot of people are posting tickets with patch attached and they are good ones and they are being put in. Now looking at the code assuming I haven't miss many changelog and that those that I missed had a ticket I can tell you that the ammount of features has been more or less stuck since sometime last year something around 0.9a5-6 was the last "new stuff" and everything since then has been adjustments and bug fixes, technically we have been in code freeze since 0.9a1 but some new methods where added after that. anyway the most missed feature (docs wise) has been widgets which is a really new component other then that most things are either deployment issues or use cases of any of the third party components. Now by this I'm not saying that docs still need improvement. Now I really dislike the way the term "user" has been used on this thread, first of all everyone here is a programmer or wants to be, second we all are here because we think python is better for webapps then any of the mayor deployed technologies, so we are not average user not average programmers. So thinks like expecting your users to <insert task here> are just totally out of place, I'll accept that kind of argument if we where programming something like wesnoth or even a tool like azureus. But saying that you can't contribute here because your "an user" it's just not acceptable at least to me. Now saying that you are a newbie that doesn't understand much of the internals that's fine but then help on something else. Let me put myself as example again, I got into TG because I saw this realllly cool screencast by a guy same Kevin something about this python app that let you create a wiki in 20min, then I slack off and back again I saw this realllly cool app call catwalk that was build on top of that think I don't remember how it was call, so I started coding toy apps on top if it and got involved more, fastforward a couple of months and I was writting some docs on trac and replying to stuff on the mailing list, and checking some stuff on the code to see where I could contribute, another set of months and I was doing the same thing, the mailing list keep growing and taking more time of me to a point that I didn't had time to read code, then I started slacking and the comunity continue to grow, some time later Kevin posted an ann about needing someone to manage trac and I saw that as a nice opportunity to help more in the current time. Today there is probably not a single ticket on trac that doesn't has a comment by me, I have practically stop working on docs and my only contribution is some random changes here and there and dropping more work on the docs wish list, I still have time to read all messages on the list and the first thing I do each time is look for unread stuff and send a reply even if it's something as stupid as I really haven't try it but foo may work, I have stop coding stuff on top of turbogears and the only code I have written is adapt patches to work with current and test other people patches. Now I say all that because as the "users" keep growing I see the dev team staying at the same size (note people have leave and others have join), and more and more "users" have been "demanding" more stuff but yet I see more people being "just users", which the worst part being that everyone knows what needs to be done but noone is actually working to make it, (please note I"m referring to people that ask without giving much back) so yes a lot of things need to be done but posting a message with anger will only give anger back and that's probably why all of you jump back at Mark when he reply with "the same thing we say to everyone" Now my real problem with a message like this is that most people will probably never read my message but they did read yours and some of them will probably based on that say yes this sucks let me move on so your actually making it worst. Now if you look at the current documentation team (leaving myself out) and taking mark which at the moment is the oldest active contributor to the project they all have very little time on the project (and not asking for a fight but most have less time that you Steve). Do you really want to know where TG docs sux really bad? try to get someone to start working on the internals of the code is not that there is flew docs about it is that there is none, try to commit a patch against any of the internal tools like catwalk that has a huge javascript/html file, now why aren't people complaining about that because most of them consider themself "users" and are really don't care about how good the project is doing but are happy as long as someone else is doing it for them. That said TG needs the following regarding docs: - take down the trac docs that are so outdated that don't even compile, but haven't been taken down because there is still some valuable info - stop complaining about the lack of docs and start helping out even spell checks and comments are great anything that will reduce the same questions over and over on the list (the FAQ is a great idea) - write docstrings that will help writing howto's - some "users" should write docs yes even if they are broken even if half needs to be rewritten half is better then nothing, and in case you haven't figure it out this will help know where the APIs are being misunderstood and/or misused. - I vote for the "have you written some docs today?" foot note - do not stop coding things like migrating to CP3 or genshi will bring us much better performance because you all have to remember that we are all here because we want better applications not having a pleasant time coding them, but yes that matters too. - and the most important thing, have fun. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. 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