Re: quo vadis, docs

[Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Le mardi 17 février 2009, à 07:46 +0000, Phil Bull a écrit :
>> It should be possible to draft in some mentors from the Ubuntu Doc team.
>> We have a few who are active at the moment and who might be interested.
>
> The obvious question is: could the Ubuntu Doc team be active upstream
> even if we don't do some program with mentorship? What can we do to
> attract those volunteers? What is currently wrong that makes them not
> help upstream?

I'm able to help with mentorship subject to work pressures, which vary
from period to period.

To answer the last question, the Ubuntu Doc team's work tends to focus
on documentation that isn't covered by the existing Gnome
documentation. We rarely have enough manpower to update the
gnome-user-guide or other documents that come from Gnome (although we
have incorporated these documents into the structure of our own
documentation using strategically placed sellotape). We occasionally
make changes to the Gnome documentation, but it's pretty rare. In most
cases this is to reflect a difference between vanilla Gnome and Ubuntu
Gnome, so the changes are not worth passing upstream anyway. Having
said that we run a bzr branch of gnome-user-docs and will certainly
encourage patches to come upstream where they are applicable. Some
patches have already made their way upstream on this basis.

Generally, Shaun has (as usual) put his finger on the main problems
with contributing to Gnome docs. From the point of view of Ubuntu
contributors who may already be familiar with xml and version control,
my feeling is that the primary ones are (1) the difficulty of
installing a vanilla Gnome desktop, (2) the complexity involved in
plugging Gnome documents into Ubuntu documents (i.e. the absence of
Mallard).

Number (1) could be solved if there were a way of testing an up to
date Gnome desktop through a website, or an easy way of putting one
into a virtual window of some kind. I don't have any experience of
either technology, but I'm sure someone reading knows how to do this.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF