Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation

[Cody A.W. Somerville]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> Hi Matthew,
>
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com>
> wrote:
> > Matthew East wrote on 22/03/08 10:06:
> >  >...
> >
> > > On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Cody A.W. Somerville
> >  >...
> >
> > >> Currently there is only the ubuntu-documentation product/project on
> >  >> launchpad which has the ubuntu documentation and its derivatives'
> >  >> bazaar branch associated with it. However, I'd like to propose that
> >  >> we create a product for each derivative's documentation since a the
> >  >> current model does not scale well attempting to have multiple
> >  >> products inside one product.
> >  >...
> >
> > > 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.
> >  >...
> >
> >  An alternative model would be to have separate *branches* of the same
> >  ubuntu-doc project for each derivative. Then each derivative can
> diverge
> >  on the things it makes sense to diverge on (e.g. the front page), while
> >  merging from each other on changes to things that they share.
>
> We started doing that when we moved to bzr -
> https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc/+branches. However what Cody is
> worried about is the fact that it's not possible to mark each of these
> as the "official" branch for a particular release series, and hence
> link it with an Ubuntu package - https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc


That isn't the only issue. As a developer and member of several different
development team both in the Ubuntu community and in the wider open source
community, I get a large volume of e-mails. The matter of the fact is that
the Xubuntu documentation and Ubuntu documentation are not the same product
and do not have the same content. Ubuntu documentation bugs are not relevant
to me and I do not want to receive them but I do want to continue to receive
bugs concerning the Xubuntu documentation. It isn't about splitting up the
community or what not, I feel we should definitely make it an objective to
do what we can to keep us working as a cohesive unit.

If there are parts of our documentation that are the same then lets remove
those parts from the individual branches and put it in a single, shared
branch. From there, either that documentation will be its own package that
is seeded in all the distributions or the individual doc packages will
include it in.

An alternative solution that I would be happy with would be shuffling the
bug contacts around. I must admit that this would not be such a big issue
for me if I did not receive the inapplicable bug e-mail. From there, we
could update the ubuntu-doc project to better reflect its purpose and that
it is home to a multi-derivative task force.


   1. Disable bug reporting on the ubuntu-doc project
   2. Rename project from Ubuntu Documentation to Ubuntu Documentation
   Project
   3. Update the description of the project to to give a clear definition
   of the project, emphasizing that the project is Ubuntu derivative agnostic.
   4. Modify the bug contacts for the ubuntu-docs, kubuntu-docs,
   xubuntu-docs, etc. etc. packages to only have the appropriate sub-team
   subscribed.
   5. Brainstorm other ways in which the different sub-teams can work
   together. For example, I imagine I wouldn't be the only member of the
   ubuntu-doc team who would be interested in helping write other desktop
   agnostic documentation. Heck, why stop with the ubuntu-doc team? Why not see
   if we could collaborate with the ubuntu-marketing team on a project?

<https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc>

>
> --
> Matthew East
> http://www.mdke.org
> gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>

Thank you,

Cody A.W. Somerville
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20080326/3c5b54c3/attachment.html>