Sec: Unclassified - Ubuntu docteam

[Sean Wheller]

On Friday 05 August 2005 04:19, Stoffers, Robert LAC wrote:
> A funny thing happen to me last night, I received a gift from the KDE
> docteam for some work I had done for them in the past (a book) and I
> stopped by their freenode irc channel to thank them. The moment I told them
> I was with the Ubuntu docteam everyone in the channel thought to themselves
> "here we go again..." and started having a go at me. It wasn't until I
> explained to them who I actually was (and the fact I have a good standing
> with them helped) did they stop and apologise. It seems a member of the
> Ubuntu docteam, who I won't identify, had been there recently telling them
> that everything he was *going to write* was better then anything they had
> and that they all will be using it. I then spent the next 20 minutes
> apologising on behalf of that member.

Yes, this type of problem has happened on a few occasions for different 
reasons. Once with myself and twice with two other people I know of.

In my case I wanted to find out more about how the team worked and how we 
could make use of them as an upstream and push changes upstream. In doing so 
I had to ask many questions and question some of the things they do so that I 
could understand the rational behind certain issues. For example:
- Why must everything be hard left aligned, why can't it be indented. 
- Why do all kde docbook files have a .docbook extension, why can't they 
be .xml.
- Why do they use an extension to the Docbook DTD (KDE.DTD), why not just use 
the standard docbook .dtd

and so on.

Members of the KDE team, did not like the fact that somebody would actually 
question the way they did things. About 5 months back, I took a real whipping 
and left licking some nasty wounds despite the contributions I have made. The 
only person who kept a level head in my case was Lauri Watts.

On the other issues with other ubuntu docteam members, I do not wish to 
comment. I think those people can come forward and explain for themselves if 
they wish. All I can say is that the KDE docteam is very quick to defend all 
that is KDE docs and will not accept critique from people very easily. There 
is some good and some bad in this, but generally I think that often peoples 
good willed intentions are misunderstood by kde doc team. They tend to see 
any new persons as just another one who has come to upset the apple cart. The 
team has been around for awhile, so they have seen it all before and is not 
very tolerant to new people who come with revolutionary ideas and high 
energy.

In some ways this is good, in others it is not.

There is a fundamental culture difference between the way gnome and kde 
docteams work. Many of the ubuntu docteam only understand the gnome method, 
which is to ask a document maintainer before making changes. At KDE anyone 
can make changes to anyones document, without asking permission of the 
maintainer.

I think the main problem though is that ubuntu docteam members have not pushed 
any work upstream to KDE and the focus is mainly on GNOME. It would be nice 
if people at ubuntu docs would make changes to the kde vendor drops and we 
could push those changes upstream. As you may know, there are KDE documents 
in our svn. I periodically merge upstream changes into this drop. I have yet 
to have the pleasure of merging changes back upstream. However, if people do 
make changes to our vendor drop, they must take care that they are generic to 
KDE and not a Kubuntu/Ubuntu specific change.


-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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