Re: quo vadis, docs

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

El dl 09 de 02 de 2009 a les 19:14 +0000, en/na Alberto Ruiz va
escriure:
> 2009/2/9 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> > On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 10:16 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> >> - Are we just waiting for some corporate sponsors to pick up the docs
> >> where Sun left them many years ago ?
> >
> > Corporate contributions to the documentation team would be
> > welcome, but picking them up the way Sun did is a band-aid
> > that will inevitably lead us back where we are right now.
> >
> > The Sun writers did a lot for our documentation, but they
> > weren't very active in the community.  When they owned a
> > document, they updated it without community involvement.
> > This left us with almost no volunteers who could pick up
> > the slack when Sun dropped out.
> >
> >> - Is there anything that can be done, short of transmutating hackers
> >> into technical writers at next guadec with the help of poisoned beer ?
> >
> > Steps that would help:
> >
> > 1) Make it easier to run the latest development version.  I got
> > myself set up for working on 2.25 documentation yesterday, in
> > part to review your patches.  It took me most of the day Sunday
> > just to get 2.25 in front of me.  And I'm a programmer.  Most
> > potential writers are not.
> >
> > 2) Provide better documentation for how to write documentation.
> > The GDP Handbook is outdated and overwhelming.
> 
> Quite true, as a matter of fact, I've been trying to learn how to
> write documentation in the latests weeks.
> 
> I know nothing about docbook and I like to consider myself sort of a
> computer literate, and I'm telling you, my frustration could be used
> as a reusable source of energy to power up a whole country at this
> point. Why on earth is so hard to learn to create a document with a
> few paragraphs and illustrations?
> 
> > 3) Make documentation easier to write.  Mallard can help.
> > 4) Make it easier to see what documentation needs work.  Pulse
> > can help.
> 
> What is Pulse? What is Mallard? How can they help?
> 
> I've been thinking how hard would it be to have a very basic webkit
> based editor that would convert the html it generates into docbook?
> 
> Really, good documentation writers are most likely people with no
> skills on SVN/DVCS/Docbook/XML whatsoever. We should provide a focused
> editor supporting the very basic stuff to write a good GNOME document.

Stormy is asking for ideas and topics for spend the advisory fundings,
so why not propose a hackfest-like meeting for documentation, by now all
hackfests have been related to programming and usability, maybe a
documentation+translation can (and it's seems that needs to) have one
also.



-- 
gil forcada

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