Re: Role and function of the docs team

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Yo :o)

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 16:43 +0100, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> Ever six months, gnome reaches feature freeze. The doc
> writers go forth and explore every single bit of the
> new gnome, and bring the docs up to date accordingly.

Well, I suppose that is the only thing we can try to do, however I don't
think there is much chance of exploring anything more than a small
fraction of any UI changes, given how few people are working on docs.

The fact is that, as far as I can see, there is already a perfectly good
system in place to track changes - a modules NEWS file. According to the
GNU Coding Standards, this file should contain all user visible changes.
I'm not sure that this was ever meant for doc writers, however if devs
filled this out properly it would be perfect for us.

This file could be a great tool, it is as much of interest to users as
well as us. It is very useful as a historical reference, so we don't get
confused. The files could be grepped from CVS - this would be perfect
for us and interesting reading for users - a great way to generate
"buzz" for marketing purposes when we publish this.

For devs this could also be a great way to show off their had work, when
a change is committed to this file, it could even be added to an RSS
feed...

Why are these files not maintained ?

Love, Karderio.



[1] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/NEWS-File.html