Re: Writing free documentation/GNOME books

["David C. Mason" <dcm redhat com>]

Miguel de Icaza <miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx> writes:

I truly hope you don't think the User documentation is lacking as that
would be a real ego deflater for me. The project has grown good feet
and now there are many people working on it from a writing, editing,
and translation standpoint. If there are any problems with it, it is
my lack of getting more GNOME hackers to give it a technical review (I
don't get the feeling too many of the major project contributors have
read it yet).

Now it is time to focus on the GTK, and GNOME developers documentation
and I hope there isn't anyone complaining about it that hasn't
contributed because that would be very counter-productive.

*re-read last paragraph please

The GTK documentation has gotten off to a great start and is being
maintained very well. I personally think it is important to get GTK
done before GNOME, but that is a personal opinion.

The state of devel docs would not be an issue if, first, people looked
over the GNOME docs status page -
http://www.gnome.org/devel/docs/TODO/todo.html. This is a great start
at assigning parts of the documentation (perhaps it needs names of
those who are doing specific parts and some more formatting) 

Once you have reviewed the status page, EVERYONE needs to take 10
minutes and write up ONE page of reference. Thats it, there are enough
of us to do this. 

I think it is important that these projects have one or two
maintainers at the maximum so that it remains well organized. I am the
sole maintainer of the User docs and would be happy to join in and
share the duties of maintaining the GNOME API project. GTK is being
handled well so we should let it grow and start contributing more. 

As to starting a company, I will try to keep my opinions to myself as
much as possible here. I personally don't think it is a good step for
the GNOME project. I think those who try will find themselves paying
similar rates to authors as the large companies do.. thats all I will
say about it at this point. Please don't simply use this paragraph to
start a large discussion... just go write some documentation and then
we can talk about the state of the industry.

Dave
-- 

          David Mason
        Red Hat AD Labs

        dcm@redhat.com