Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation

[Phil Bull]

Hi Matt, Cody,

On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 09:49 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> I'm raising this issue again because I don't think it is a good thing
> that different parts of our project are using a separate project
> (xubuntu-docs) and different parts are using a single project
> (ubuntu-docs, kubuntu-docs, edubuntu-docs). I've already seen some
> confusion start to grow with translation teams about where to find our
> branches and translations as a result of this change, and I think we
> need to plump for one way or the other.

Quite right, it has to be one or the other. Otherwise, everything will
turn into a big confused mess.

> As I've said in the past, I don't think the project group is the right
> way to go, and I won't repeat myself about my reasons for that, but we
> need to settle on a way of doing this that is consistent.

As I see it, the doc team currently works in a fragmented and mostly
uncoordinated way. Cody's approach is best suited to this way of
working, I think, since most work is performed by one or two people
working in isolation from the rest of the team. Having separate projects
removes the noise generated by people working on unrelated things.

I don't think that this is the way forward, though. Most of us only
concentrate on our own projects. In fact, we're currently little more
than a group of independent projects. It's bad enough having independent
third-party documentation to confuse our users with, let alone having
independent official docs! I think that allowing Cody's change in
Launchpad is a slippery slope to complete divergence.

I suggest that we use Matthew's approach and keep everything under one
umbrella project. If this gets in the way of people's workflows, we can
develop tools to get around those problems.

I also suggest that we start discussing a direction for the Ubuntu
documentation as a whole. What are we working towards? How do the
different projects fit together? Are we meeting our users' needs?

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull