Re: Nine Months in Six Months



> 
> You'll notice one of the new things in my proposal
> was the idea of a string review.  There are a lot
> of crappy strings in our interfaces, often because
> many of our programmers just don't have very good
> English skills.
> 
> And that's fine.  Hey, my German pretty much sucks,
> although I can get by with it.  I can't expect the
> world to have perfect English.  So we'll do some
> string reviews instead, where we can fix problems.
> 
> But now you want all these programmers to assemble
> their documentation piecemeal as they add features?
> 
> Even if they all had perfect English (which they
> don't), and even if they were all really good at
> explaining things (which they aren't), this would
> still produce bad documentation.  Why?  Because it
> would only ever produce "What's this?" documents,
> and never "How do I?" documents.
> 
> I find myself shooting down this idea every single
> release cycle.
> 
> --
> Shaun
> 
> 

Agree, it's really a problem, but look at usability guys, they all just
do a review, interface is created by developers. Developers are
certainly not professional UI designers but HIG shows them the correct
direction. It's much easier to review something and correct mistakes
then to write it from scratch.

Gustavo's point about rising entrance barrier is also a good objection,
but let me disagree that code is more important than docs. Moreover I
think we should encourage newbies to write some docs, this way they will
understand application and feature use cases, they will clear the vision
of application behavior. Code is a minor thing we know, people make
project better ;)

But documentation is a minor thing, correct design decisions are much
more important, documentation was the first item in the list, but I push
roadmap policy and proposal policy more. Do we need cross-platform GNOME
or not, do we provide complete development platform with stuff for
collaboration, advanced messaging and networking or just an advanced UI
library..

Heh, my German is even more worse, but I hope you'll get an idea.

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