About developer.gnome.org

["Lucas Rocha" <lucasr gnome org>]

Hi all,

The GNOME Developer site is quite outdated. IMO, we're giving a really
bad impression because the website is considered official (it's linked
directly from w.g.o) but we haven't put anywhere a note stating that
d.g.o is basically unmaintained for a long time. So, I made a quick
analysis of the current d.g.o content to check what we can do to kill
this website or at least to cleanup its content.

---

- News
Completely outdated content. Last news entry is from 2004. I guess we
don't need it anymore.

- Release Planning
Links to l.g.o page[1]. So, it's migrated.

- GNOME Developer's Feature Article
The latest feature article is "Getting the Most Out of GNOME CVS". So,
you can have an idea of how outdated this is. There are 7 feature
articles in the archive. Move them to wiki or make them available on
library.g.o?

- Architecture
Most of the content of those pages overlap with the "Overview of the
GNOME Platform"[2] written by Shaun. Also, it's quite outdated. Making
Shaun's guide available in library.g.o should be enough.

- Documentation
This one has several subsections.

"GNOME Policies" only have the accounts policy which is in l.g.o already[3].

"Whitepapers" has three items: one article about Nautilus internals
(which could be available in the wiki or library.g.o) and two
(useless) links to libxml and libxslt respectively.

"Tutorials" is just a bunch of links to several tutoriais. This could
be be simply moved to a wiki page. "Programming Guides" has a list of
guides which could be available in library.g.o. Some of the articles
are obsolete.

"API" is a list of links to API docs for GNOME platform libraries.
This can be available in library.g.o.

"Standards" is a just a list of specs. Most of them are part of
FreeDesktop.Org initiative now. No need to have it.

"FAQ" links to an incomplete/broken document. No need to have it.

"GTK+/Gnome Application Development" links to a webpage about Havoc's
book. A link to the book could be added to some wiki page.

"Online Books" links to Havoc's book and another book called "Writing
GNOME Applications" by John R. Sheets. Same applies here.

- Development tools
"GNOME Bug Tracker" links to some basic links for bug triagers. This
content is covered in the Bugsquad[4] wikipages already. "Glade
Builder" has links to glade page. "GNU Build Tools" has some basic
links about autotools. "Scripts" is a list of small tools for daily
tasks for developers. This could be in a wiki page too. "GNOME SVN" is
updated but it could be in a wikipage as well. "Getting Involved" is
quite incomplete and we already have something better in the wiki[5].
"External Resources" is quite useless: just a bunch of links.
"Projects" is a list to the webpages of our internal projects. We
already have a good and more complete list of them in the wiki[6]

- Projects
Accessibility Project: official pages only in d.g.o
Bugsquad: migrated to l.g.o[7]
Documentation Project: migrated to l.g.o[8]
Packaging Project: migrated to l.g.o[9]
Translation Project: migrated to l.g.o[10]
Usability Project: official pages only in d.g.o. It has some pages in
the wiki[11]
Webhackers: mostly migrated to l.g.o[12]
Art GNOME: link to art.gnome.org

Some important guides from those projects are still hosted in d.g.o.
Move them to library.g.o?

---

This is just a kickoff message so that we can start discussing about
the death (or full cleanup) of developer.gnome.org. Maybe we could
ping the projects to check/suggest what content they could migrate to
the wiki or to the new library.g.o (which is scheduled[13] for 2.20).

As an imediate action, I think we could add a note on d.g.o's front
page warning that the website is mostly unmaintained.

Comments?

Cheers!

--lucasr

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning
[2] http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/platform-overview/
[3] http://live.gnome.org/NewAccounts
[4] http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad
[5] http://live.gnome.org/JoinGnome
[6] http://live.gnome.org/TeamWorkspaces
[7] http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad
[8] http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject
[9] http://live.gnome.org/PackagingProject
[10] http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject
[11] http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityTeam
[12] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb
[13] http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap