Re: Sun-updated docs submitted to /contrib

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 14:57 +0900, Ryan McDougall wrote:
>On Fri, 2005-25-02 at 10:44 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote:
>> Hey,
>> 
>> > As you know, the Sun docteam has been updating and creating 
>> > documentation for the Sun release of the Java Desktop System. I have put 
>> > the following tarballs in the gnome-docu/gdp/contrib/JDSR3 directory in 
>> > CVS now if you want to use any of them for the upcoming GNOME release:
>> 
>> It should be noted that JDS 3 will be based on GNOME 2.6.
>> 
>> Glynn
>> 
>
>I may be totally out of line here, and if so don't hesitate to put me in
>my place, but wouldn't it be easier for both Sun and GNOME to work on
>patching documentation upstream, then branching from there for JDS
>specific releases instead of doing it the opposite way?
>
>Anyways, I am still happy to have any help, so don't take it as a
>criticism.

Well, I don't think you're out of line.  It's a perfectly valid
question.

JDS has longer release cycles than Gnome and it uses older versions of
Gnome.  Sun's documentation team's primary focus is (and should be) the
documentation for the version of Gnome Sun is shipping.  By the time Sun
is playing with the documentation for the upcoming Gnome 2.10 release,
the community will have already moved on to 2.14 or 2.16 or whatever,
and we probably won't be making 2.10.x releases anymore.

Nobody is really to blame here.  The logistics of our respective release
cycles just aren't conducive to Sun putting all their efforts into the
current community releases.

They do contribute back the changes they've made.  While it's too late
for us to incorporate their changes directly, it does help us to see
things we might have missed, and to improve the current documentation
we're working on.

--
Shaun