Re: [midgard-user] Midgard Web site redesign

[Philipp Rotmann, Linksystem Muenchen]

     Hi Ron,

Disclaimer ;-): As your argumentation was sharper than expected,
I'm not sure whether I used the proper words in my explanation.
I hope the following clarifies those issues ...

On 06.01.01 (15:16), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > Well, IMHO every document (or topic, or any meaningful part
> > of the whole thing) should have his owner(s) who is/are the
> > only one(s) to edit it.
> 
> Well, my opinions aren't humble and they're based on
> experience and a fair amount of observation. No apologies will
> be offered.
> 
> What about Marius' rewrite of Azman's installation guide? If
> we adobt your proposal, MPRy is hostage to Azman and there is
> no rewritten installation guide.

Stop :-)  Of course, there has to be some kind of backup
mechanism. When the original owner(s) of a document don't
respond to annotations and other proposals, the Documentation
Maintainer Himself (or the Master of the Next Node Up the Tree
;-)) could take over ownership of the disregarded topic or give
it to someone else.

In my view, it's just the same as with open source code
development -- not everyone has CVS access, right?

> Commentext provides versioning and gives the reader the choice
> of selecting what version they want to read: A; Azman's or B;
> Marius'. Should Azman decide to incorporate Marius' rewrite,
> then that edited version can be marked as the default.
> 
> The least important people in these scenarios are the writers
> and editors. The people that matter most are the readers and
> with Commentext, the reader decides what version to examine.

Agreed.  But on the other hand, we also want to offer as few as
possible ways through the documentation, don't we? If we used
Commentext to its full extent with different branches and
versions of every document or part of a document, no one would
still be able to read through the stuff as navigation would get
way to complex.

So someone would have to edit the whole thing, incorporate
changes into the trunk and keep the 'official' documentation
consistent while everyone else still had the opportunity to
publicly propose changes and additions. But the public shouldn't
have the right to edit the main branch.

Aren't we actually quite close in our opinions?

> I have examined the Midgard documentation effort for fair
> amount of time. We're typical of most Open Source projects. We
> suffer from a lack of quality documentation. Open Source
> documentation is largely a lip service topic. Not many people
> really want to work on it. Those who do are overly protective
> of their work because they're inexperienced. They're more
> concerned with themselves than they're with the larger issue
> of contributing towards producing the best possible product.
> Commentext is the only solution I've seen that addresses the
> problem.

Agreed -- if the real editing is done by some group of
documentation maintainers who are partly pushed by public
pressure to keep the trunk at optimum quality of the respective
branches.

     phr
-- 
Linksystem Muenchen GmbH                          [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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80634 Muenchen                              Tel. 089 / 890 518-0
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