Re: wip/system-admin-guide branch

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hey Kat,

Just to clarify a few things...

Ekaterina Gerasimova <kittykat3756 gmail com>, Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:08:08
+0100:

> Hi Petr,
>
> On 18 April 2013 16:12, Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org> wrote:
>
> > For now, we are working on the sysadmin guide in a separate branch
> > called wip/system-admin-guide. To avoid possible duplication of our
> > effort in the future, I'd suggest that we all start using the
> > wip/system-admin-guide branch.
>
> I suggested that Jana work in a branch (which I recommended that she name
> in a way that made it clear that it was her personal playground) for two
> reasons:
> - She pushed incorrect instructions to master for internal Red Hat builds

I'm not quite sure what do you mean by "internal Red Hat builds". We
don't use any "internal Red Hat builds" to document GNOME. ;-)

AFAIK Jana is using Fedora 19 pre-alpha with the latest GNOME builds, which
are as close to upstream as it gets I think.

I wish we had a review process more friendly to newcomers, as dealing with
git patches and having to redo them in case the previous patch was rejected
can get cumbersome rather quickly.

With my translator hat on, I have to say our translators also have to learn
the git basics at some point, but with the submission process on
10n.gnome.org, they can at least focus more on what really matters (that
is, translating) than the technicalities of workflow processes originally
designed for developers in mind. Just my 2 cents.

> - She did not follow the review process
>
> Had these two problems not come up, it would have been correct for her to
> push directly to master, so the branch would not have existed. Aruna
> followed the process, which is why I told her to push her changes to
> master.
>
> It is unfortunate that such a generic name was chosen for the branch as it
> seems to have lead to some confusion.

I understand that development - in many cases - happens on master. Since
there is no gnome-3-8 branch and upcoming stable releases will probably be
released directly from master, I don't feel quite comfortable writing a
guide, which is under heavy development, on master. This is exactly why I
proposed working in a wip branch.

The same applies to classic mode additions in gnome-help. We have the
wip/classic-mode branch for that.

> > Before one of the next stable releases (.2/.3?), we can then rebase the
> > branch on top of master.
> >
> > Are you OK with this workflow?
>
> Do you have a good reason for working this way? Rebasing a branch can take
> a lot of effort and time. Development should be on master, but it's
> important that the quality of the documentation is maintained in the
> process.

Have a look at various GNOME modules, developers use wip branches
extensively. If that worflow works well for developers, I think it should
also work for documentation writers.

> On that subject, 3.8.2 is due for release on the 13th of May, which is
> only 3.5 weeks away, and there has not been much activity in fixing those
> incorrect instructions that I mentioned earlier. There are even some
> "accepted - commit now" patches on Bugzilla, waiting to be committed, do
> you know when these will be looked at?

I will go through these with Jana in the next couple of days. As always,
thanks for your reviews. 

I would prefer to have most of our planned topics documented for .3, but
this will take some time, since as per https://live.gnome.org/SysAdminGuide
there appear quite a few topics that are yet to be covered, so the May
deadline for all the tasks seems to be too optimistic. I plan to look at
those as well, anyway.

Cheers,
Petr Kovar