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

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 18:28, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 19:21, John Fleck wrote:
> > > I would kiss the person who would come up with an online doc for all
> > > this stuff. I looked at gnome-docu/gdp/gdp-example2 a little and the doc
> > > stuff still has an element of 'voodoo' in it.
> > > 
> > 
> > We've got this already in the latest draft of the GDP Handbook (thanks to
> > Eric's work):
> > http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/handbook/buildingdocs.html
> > We've also got a version in Malcolm's porting guide, though I blush to realize
> > it's slightly out of date (/me adds a note to his own todo list :-)
> > http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/porting/ar01s06.html
> 
> Note that if this isn't well documented on-line, the docs team will
> probably be held to the same standard as UI and a11y- if it's not
> documented by the relevant team, bugs filed against that problem by the
> relevant team will not be considered showstoppers until the docs are
> fixed. We can't expect people to get the information from thin air- it's
> got to be on the web, or we can't really expect them to fix it. Seth has
> set a high bar with HIG 1.0- for once ;) everyone else has to follow his
> lead :)

Yes, I agree with this.  The Handbook documents the technical side of
writing and maintaining documentation in GNOME.  This Handbook is for
doc writers as well as maintainers.  Right now I am going over the
DocBook Basics section with a fine tooth comb.  A section about writing
unique consistent section ids has been added thanks to Irene Ryan and
Alexander Kirillov.  I am also planning to add OMF files explained in
plain English.  Dan Mueth as written a great technical explanation of
writing OMF files at
http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/documentation/writing_scrollkeeper_omf_files/index.html
The OMF explanation in the Handbook will be written with less technical
details and more hand holding so even Glynn can understand the OMF
files.  If anyone wants to review the Handbook I'll accept any
comments.  Just email the gnome doc list at docs gnome org or myself.

Eric Baudais