Re: quo vadis, docs

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
[...]
>
> Amen. I've often felt developers should be required to document their
> own UI changes :) Heck, simply asking 'what does this dialog mean'
> would be useful a lot of the time...[1]

Luis do you write software ?

Not that its important that you do, but just to clarify the issue;
"simply asking what does this dialog mean" in the long run usually means:
   - Take a screen shot of the dialog
   - Open the html or whatever the docs are written in
   - take time to format the docs/text/images in a readable way
   - take time to properly describe your feature or functionality
   - take time to write a healthy ChangeLog entry for your
     docs commit.

I am going to generalize here and guess that if you are not GTK+,
and you are not epiphany or gimp - then its pretty much safe to
say you are a one man team plus the occasional extra guy, or
a few randomly submitted patches (which often generate more work
for the maintainer than bugs fixed or features implemented) - you can hardly
find time to update the website when you make a release, much less
spend time writing user docs.

Sorry I'm starting to run my trap here, I tend to take it to heart
when time and time again I find our manpower is seriously overestimated
(which must also be a good thing, if the mere handful of dudes we are
hacking code managed to accomplish so much and seem like
such a big team).

Cheers all,
         -Tristan