Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation

[Matthew East]

Hi

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Cody A.W. Somerville
<cody-somerville at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm pretty concerned with
> > the idea about creating too much divergence between the various
> > *buntu-docs projects. In particular, doing this would create extra bug
> > lists (for the new projects and another one for the super-project) and
> > I think we've already got too many: the bug lists for Ubuntu packages
> > and those for the separate Launchpad project.
>
> I actually see this as a benefit. I'm tired of getting bugmail for kubuntu
> and ubuntu docs - they are _never_ relevant to me. And if one happens to be,
> it should be discussed on the mailing list.

I don't think that's really true - most of the material we work on is
(or should be) common or similar across all the derivatives... and
since the team that works on the branches is the same, that's the team
that can fix a bug in any derivative's documentation - I think it's
right that bugmail goes across the whole team. It's part of what keeps
us together to know what is going on with the other derivatives'
material.

> Furthermore, it is entirely possible to disable the bug reporting ability
> for products.

But it becomes really confusing for someone searching Launchpad trying
to find out where they can report their bug.

> > I'm also concerned that this would lead to the various branches
> > getting further apart. I know that the current system doesn't fit
> > Launchpad perfectly, but I also think that's partly due to flaws in
> > Launchpad itself. I'm not convinced that opening separate projects
> > would be a better solution than the one we have now.
>
> How would having separate products do this? They'll all still be listed on
> the same page under the commit team as the commit team will retain ownership
> of the branch.

I think that simply establishing separate projects for the different
derivatives will create a stigma of separation which will have that
effect automatically. I've seen lots of teams grow in this community
and I've learnt that if you genuinely want a team to stay together,
you need to work hard at that. That's why I'm so wary of things like
this.

I'm also concerned about any increased level of complexity. Already
it's pretty artificial to have an upstream project at all, given that
all our work is Ubuntu based. We should really be able to do
everything on the "ubuntu" project, and eventually I think that will
be possible.

If there was a really important benefit behind the proposal, I think I
would probably have a different view, but I don't see that right now.
Let's see what others in the team feel.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF