Fwd: Difference between the User's Guide and the Gnome User's Guide

[John Hornbeck]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
> Date: January 15, 2005 9:16:41 PM CST
> To: John Hornbeck <hornbeck at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Difference between the User's Guide and the Gnome User's 
> Guide
>
> On Sat, Jan 15, 2005 at 08:12:17PM -0600, John Hornbeck wrote:
>
>> In all honesty I don't know how much difference there is.  I have not
>> really looked at the Gnome User's Guide so it could be the same.  I
>> know the quick guide is basicly the same as the userguide, because we
>> where going to share alot of the information across the two.  It may 
>> be
>> a good idea to drop the userguide for right now and focus on the gnome
>> user's guide and on the quick guide.  Just a idea.
>
> Uhm... the QuickGuide should be much different from any User's Guide:
> it should be more like a short intro to apps rather than a real guide.
> I intend to write a chapter of it to see if this really means a big
> difference.
>
> However, if the User's Guide risks being a duplicate of the Gnome 
> User's
> Guide, we should really put that on pause and focus on rebranding the
> Gnome User's Guide, which, I've been told, is something that the Gnome
> people want to make it an easy thing to do.
>
> Did you have contacts with them, to ask for more clues on how to do
> this rebranding?
>
> Also, do you mind if we move this conversation to the list?
>
>
I had no contacts with anyone from gnome.  Let me give the history of 
this guide.  It was going to be a book which I was going to write for 
publication first.  I would have been along the line of "Learning 
Redhat Linux".  Than I received a lot of flack because I was going it 
alone even though no one had offered to help in the first place.  Chris 
Haas than was suggesting to make it the project that the whole docteam 
would work on instead of a FAQ and the book.  The original idea behind 
this was to just join the FAQ and book.  This never happened.  It was 
also discussed that everyone from the team would take a piece of the 
book to write and it would be released by hoary as our main doc.  Than 
it sat there for about a month with no one touching it.  After the 
Mataro meeting I guess you guys decided on a quickguide, which from 
what I heard was going to be just about what we had wanted for the 
book, which had now become the user guide and was going to only be 
about a page for each subject such as "How to burn a data cd" and "How 
to burn a audio cd", so as you can tell it was not going to be in dept. 
   So by this time, what was going to originally going to be a book I 
wrote on my own to be published, that would serve as a teaching aid in 
classes, had now become something completely different and in all 
honesty I had lost interest and it seemed the rest of the team had 
also.  We now where working on the quickguide.    That now seems to be 
where we are now.  I have no idea what is wanted by anyone anymore of 
what is what basicly.

In all honesty I lost interest in doing most of this because of no one 
being able to decide what we needed to do and everything getting 
changed constantly.  As a team the doc team did more work in the first 
two weeks after the preview release of Warty than they have done from 
than on.  We worked fast and got a lot of good docs done.  Now it is 
all to formal of a process and everything has to go to commity before 
being done and people don't want to do things the same way.  I am sad 
that it became this way, and I hope everyone works it all out because I 
know it stopped being fun for me.

Sorry to go off on all of that but I needed to say it.  For the user 
guide, dis ban it, it was going to be just like the quick guide, or 
redo all of it.  We where supposed to rebrand the gnome docs from the 
beginning for warty release but Sivan and I did not get them done.

Have fun,

John

> Ciao,
>
> Enrico
>
> --
> GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
>
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