Re: GNOME homepage !! (was Re: GNOME 1.4 package list)

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 05:37:51PM -0400 or thereabouts, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Frank Felfe <innerspace@iname.com> writes: 
> > Not exactly. I'm just trying to find out how the GNOME homepage
> > maintenance is organized since I couldn't find any information about it.
> > Also I'd like to animate people to think about the issue and create
> > better structures for homepage maintenance if they don't exist yet.
> > If organisation and tasks are clear, then I could think about
> > volunteering.
> 
> If you need clear organization and tasks, you can't work on free
> software stuff, sorry. :-( (I'm not being mean; this is just the
> truth. Only "self-starters" get work done on free software projects.)

I'm not convinced.

We had this problem with docs. And then suddenly the docs project
exploded, relative to what had been going on. I can think of three
or four reasons for that. But I'm inclined to think that the doctable
(much as I complain about the size of its tables over a slow link)
_really_ helped.

The doctable was (is :))  a list of all the things we could think of
that needed doing, what needed doing, and how far it had got. People 
added their names next to things to claim them and updated (or,
in my case, didn't -- mea culpa) the information as they went along.

It made it very easy for people to see bite-sized chunks they could
get started with and do and think they weren't wasting time. There was
and is of course no requirement that these are the only tasks. If
someone wanted to write a document describing all the different
terminology of window managers to describe the same things, they'd
be eagerly welcomed, as would API docs (HINT!) and so on. But it
did show what we thought was important, undone and/or unclaimed at
the time, and it was started right about the time things started to
rocket along.

We do not all learn to swim by being thrown in the water. Some of
us find it easier to learn with a flotation aid first, and some of
us eventually learn that the flotation aids are more confidence-
boosters than anything else. And it's much more pleasant than drowning :)

In this case, I am under the impression that www.gnome.org's contents
live in CVS. I don't have bandwidth to checkout the gnome-web (or whatever) 
module just on spec, but if there's not a TODO, HACKING or whatever file
in it, perhaps it could do with one. If there is, then we have tasks.
If not organisation :) 

Telsa (who also had problems learning to swim :))