[long] Canonical are you serious?

[Sean Wheller]

To whoever may care at Canonical, I seriously wonder if you are serious about 
having Ubuntu Documentation or not.

In the short time I have been with the project we have managed to achieve much 
on our own, but there are things on which we do need your support. All I can 
say is that getting that support has been slow to non-existant.

Most recently we have had discussions regarding whether or not we should 
actually even pursue certain documentation projects, for example the Ubuntu 
User Guide. At first everyone thought they were going to just write it all 
from scratch. Shortly after, they realized that not enough people are 
committing to it and had to drop the, "not invented here" way of thinking. 
Around this time I posed the question, "Why do we need a user guide?" Others 
have asked the same.

My feeling is that 90% this book is already written upstream in the form of 
the GNOME Doc project. What we need is to reuse the upstream more. That's 
what OSS is all about right?

I made proposal to the list and there were many discussions on IRC the latest 
of which included a member of the GNOME team. So when I embarked on an 
investigation to find a simple way for us to use vendor drops it was not 
without some reasoning. The plan was to build Ubuntu Guides with a dependancy 
on upstream. The benefit would be that we could build custom ubuntu docs 
faster and move stuff upstream if required. As I said, lots of time went into 
this and much discussion. Finally after spending three days working out how 
things can hang together in a way that will work for the ubuntu-doc team, I 
met enrico on IRC.

I explained that I have a solution and am able to generate Ubuntu docs with 
dependencies on GNOME upstream vendor drops. However, the solution needs 
Subversion 1.1.1 or higher. Enrico explained that he had been chasing Elmo to 
move the repository from hornbecks' host to a Canonical server without much 
success. Now warty does not have SVN 1.1.1/2 so this would be an additional 
problem. I can't see why? Just install SVN 1.1.2, upgrade your Apache2 and be 
done with it.

At this point I started to see problems and my frustration mounted. Poor 
enrico got the raw end. But since enrico is the only person doing anything 
from the Canonical side for the doc team, he was in the line of fire. For the 
record my blatant comments were directed at Canonical, or whoever at 
Canonical should care but is not. Not at enrico.

So to whoever at Canonical, for goodness sake, you want ubuntu to be a 
community project. You want free contributions. So at least react with 
greater urgency when people ask for things nicely. We have not asked for a 
new world wonder. All we want is to have a Canonical server hosting the 
repository and running a version of svn that supports symlinks.

Now if that can't be done, then please warn ahead of time so that people like 
me don't spend hours for nothing. There have been enough transparent messages 
and discussions for anyone at Canonical to step in and say, we can't move the 
svn or it must be the SVN packed with warty.

As a result of this and in light of the hard slog it has been to get most 
things done on this project.  I will be closing my current commitments in an 
orderly manner and will be leaving the project to spend my 'valuable' time 
elsewhere. I really don't think free contributors should have to beat their 
heads against a brick wall.

If this message manages to get people into gear, then it will have achieved 
its goal and my leaving the project on this note would have been worth it.

All the best for the future.

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