Re: who gets in and why, aka the GNOME Desktop inclusion criteria

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 20:55, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 08:48:59PM -0500, Eric Baudais wrote:
> > While I feel you have a good set of standards for the GNOME desktop to
> > live up to I believe you have left out one of the most important
> > requirements.  I think all GNOME desktop applications need to have good
> > documentation.  This means the documentation uses the tools provided by
> > the GDP to display and install the documentation.  The documentation
> > follows the GNOME Documentation Style Guide and the GNOME Handbook of
> > Writing Documentation.  The documentation is a11y compliant.  Good
> > documentation is key to usability and educating newbies about the GNOME
> > desktop and Free Software.
> 
> Well, yes and no as to whether it was left out. There was a reference to
> the porting guide and I guess that was implictly talking mostly about
> this page:
> 
> 	http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/porting/ar01s02.html
> 
> where it gives a description of the steps required to be "fully ported"
> (for some definition of that phrase that Telsa, Glynn and I made up on
> IRC one night a long while ago). See step 4 of that checklist. :)

The porting guide gives the raw basics.  I believe that the
documentation requires more than just writing end user documentation. 
The maintainer needs to make a help menu and buttons inside the help
menu for the documentation.  The maintainer needs to add a button to any
preferences dialog.  The maintainer needs to use Scrollkeeper and the
gdp-example2 build example to install the documentation.  The maintainer
needs to use Yelp and the appropriate system calls to link the buttons
added to his application so the documentation displays nicely.  This is
just for end user documentation.

For libraries the developers need to provide a whitepaper detailing the
general usage and operations of the technology the library implements. 
The developers need to fully document the API.  The developers need to
use gtk-doc or similar code commenting tools to build the API
documentation.  I have yet to see a whitepaper on any of the developing
GNOME technologies especially Mono.  This is very bad if GNOME expects
other developers to use the new technologies in GNOME 2.

Eric Baudais