[orca-list] Building Time and Orca Doc Squad ( was Re: FLAG DAY - Profiles and a new settings manager)

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey Steve.

> Also, I notice with these changes, it takes a lot longer to build than
> before.  I suppose that's one of the prices for the new configuration
> system?

It's one of the prices of our having our help in our module. But I think
that's a small price to pay. I mean, it doesn't take *that* long. Try
building things like Firefox, WebKitGtk, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice and
you appreciate what a snappy build Orca is <huge grin>. And the benefit
we get is that we're no longer limited to just "basic" help, which is
what belongs in the GNOME Desktop Accessibility Guide. Instead, we can
start adding the additional content that we think all users need to know
about Orca. To a certain extent we already do this on our wiki, but not
as much as we could. AND the benefit of having important docs officially
living in our help means we have the services of the awesome GNOME i18n
team translating our content into content that *all* Orca users can
read. Right now, you need to know English, Spanish, or Portuguese (i.e.
to access the wiki content). That leave a lot of folks out. :-(

Of course, we cannot go nuts putting everything but the kitchen sink in
our new documentation. If we did, then we might be faced with epic build
times rivaling those of the aforementioned modules. Plus the more we
include in our help content, the more we are asking the awesome (and I
assume, largely volunteer) i18n team to do. So we need to determine what
is a must-have versus what is a nice-to-have. If it's a must-have, it
belongs in our official help content. If it is a nice-to-have, it
belongs on our wiki, keeping in the back of our minds that we could
consider it for official inclusion it in a subsequent year.

And that brings me to the following, which I alluded to in the subject
of this message: I would like there to be an Orca Doc Squad. The duties
of the Doc Squad would include:

* Reviewing all the existing help and submitting corrections
* Reviewing all the existing wiki content, determining what should
  be removed due to not being useful, and updating what's there.
  To be honest, our wiki has become a bit of a mess and I simply
  have not had the time to weed and prune.
* Writing new content (plain text is fine and encouraged) for
  inclusion in either the official help contents or the wiki

Assuming we can find enough of you interested (note that I said "squad"
and not "lone wolf"), that would allow me to take this off my plate so
that I could focus more on bugs and rfe's. That would be an enormous
help to me personally, and a great service to the community.

The ultimate goal in my mind, would be to have our Doc Squad join the
GNOME Documentation Project. That would ensure that we stay up-to-date
on what's going on with respect to documentation, and that the
Documentation Project has people it can readily go to should they have
questions about accessibility.

So.... Any takers? I have created a new page on our wiki:
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/DocSquad

I think the first step is to figure out who has the time and interest to
take this on. If you are interested, please sign up on the wiki page I
have created as I will not be monitoring this list for names I need to
add. Once we have a group/squad, we can discuss how to move forward.

Thanks guys! Take care.
--joanie