Making 2.26 Documentation Rock

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Feature freeze for 2.6 is January 19th:

http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentyfive

This means it's time to heat up the documentation process.
Many of you know that I've been working on a project tracker
called Pulse.  One of the primary goals of Pulse is to help
us track the status of our documentation.

We still don't have an official deployment running, but I've
got a test instance running in my home direction on gnome.org.
Note that the crawler is not running automatically.  I run it
locally and upload the data manually.  I try to do this often,
but it could take up to a day for Pulse to see your changes.

Here is a list of all of the documentation in Gnome 2.26:

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/pulse/web/set/gnome-2-26-desktop#documents

And here is a list of the documentation where the GDP is
listed as a contributor:

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/pulse/web/team/userdocs#documents

Click on 'Maintainer' to show only those documents that are
listed as being maintained by the GDP.  These are documents
that we have direct control over.  I can approve commits to
them without asking module maintainers.

In the list of all documentation in 2.26, you can sort the
documents by a number of criteria.  The most important of
these is "status".  Back in September, I outlined a proposal
for status tracking:

http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/StatusTracking

This was well-received, so we're going to try to use it for
the 2.26 release cycle.  We can always revise the process
after we've had some experience with it.

My suggestion for anyone who wants to contribute follows:

Pick a document.  It's probably best to pick from the list
of GDP-maintained documents first.  We can move more quickly
on these documents while we figure out what we're doing.

Give the document a quick review to determine an initial
status and record it in the DocBook.  Here's an example of
how I recorded information in one document:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-devel-docs/trunk/gdp-style-guide/C/gdp-style-guide.xml?r1=581&r2=582

Do *NOT* set an initial status higher than "update".  Only
use "update" if the document seems to describe Gnome 2.24
reasonably well.  If the document is referring to a bunch
of stuff from 2.16 or something, or if it just never had
the information it should have, mark it as "incomplete"
or even "stub".

If you have experience with DocBook and have committed to
documentation in Gnome SVN before, you have my permission
to commit initial status information to any document that
is maintained by the GDP.  Otherwise, just send an email
to the list with a patch so we can make sure it's right.

After that, get writing.  Try to move through the status
indicators.  Your first goal is to get a complete document
structure with technically correct information.  Stay in
touch with the mailing list, or ask question on the #docs
channel on irc.gnome.org.

In the next week or so, it would be nice to get some stuff
up on live.gnome.org on how to write and edit a document.
This would include information on what sort of information
the document should provide, how it should be organized,
and a quick introduction to DocBook.  I will try to put
some content together, but I would certainly appreciate
help from our more experienced writers.

--
Shaun