Re: Triage guide...

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 10:17:35AM -0600, Elijah P Newren wrote:
> As aes suggested, I'm going to try to merge the current triage guide
> with an extended one that I made
> (www.math.utah.edu/~newren/howto-triage/).  However, I still haven't
> gotten a whole lot of feedback on that guide.  I'm wondering if it's
> because people don't like the overall one that I have (even if they
> might like certain parts) and don't want to offend me.  Chickens.  I'm
> only going to be offended if you tell me that my idea of making triage
> examples are worthless (they're the main reason I wrote that page; and
> I'm betting you won't say this since aes and aldug already told me they
> liked them--or at least the idea of them), the other stuff I don't care
> as much about.

OK, I'm as guilty as everybody else ... I have not read it. Will try to
make time to do so today.

> Here's one area where I'm starting to think that my triage guide sucks. 
> The majority of the people that decide to help out have at least some
> kind of programming experience.  These people are definitely the most
> able to help, yet my guide, since it was geared more towards people
> without programming ability or computer knowledge, may turn them off
> with the level of detail it has.  I was thinking of throwing almost all
> of my extra stuff into a well organized FAQ and then adding "(See also
> FAQ B-13)" or "(See also FAQs #2 and #8)" throughout a streamlined
> simplified guide.  [Of course, some FAQs wouldn't be referenced and are
> simply in the FAQ for more information].  This would also make it really
> easy for us to answer people's questions on IRC ("Look at FAQ C-2").
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?  Other pointers/ideas/suggestions/gripes?

Well, things like bug-days are often aimed at non-developers.  Bug
triaging is one of the areas we regularly encourage people who are not
willing to be hackers to contriute to. So however you structure the
document, I think a reasonable level of basic information should remain.
I think you are misassessing the audience here.

> Also, sublime brought up on IRC today that an
> extended/re-written/something'ed guide to cvs might be useful.  Does
> that sound reasonable?  Does it even belong in the bugsquad pages, or
> would it belong elsewhere on gnome?  [In either event, I'll probably
> defer any writing of such a guide to someone else...]

Do you mean a guide on just how to check to stuff out of CVS
anonymously, or a guide for developers? In the latter case, such a
document already exists, it just hasn't been checked into CVS yet due to
an oversight (it's not a document I wrote, but I've read it -- it's very
good). Given the enormous amount of developer-level documentation
required in GNOME at the moment, if you were inclined to write more
docs, this would not be one worth duplicatingi (but I have a file with
about 40 ideas in it for documents we do need, so get in contact with
me, or post something to gnome-docs-list if you are interested in doing
more writing).

Malcolm

-- 
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.