Team processes for Karmic (was Re: Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation)

[Matthew East]

Hi Phil,

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!

Well, I think that there are definitely ways in which we could improve
the workflow and sharing between different projects. Those are the
subject of a separate thread and Jim has put some interesting
proposals forward which I definitely think we should discuss.

However, we should remember that writing documentation for Ubuntu,
Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu will inevitably require a separate work
product. It will also require people with different experiences to
contribute to each, not least because you definitely have to have used
the flavour that you are documenting in order to contribute. I'm a
huge proponent of doing everything possible to keep us coherent as a
team, but we do need to recognise that people are likely to end up
contributing to the area of the documentation that they are interested
in and familiar with.

I think the best way forward to address your concern is to discuss how
these people can share better (I think bzr really does provide us with
a good merging platform to share material which is relevant to all
distributions) and how the processes of the team can be modified to
ensure that those working on Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu docs can
benefit from the work which goes into Ubuntu docs (for example, by
concentrating significant work on new material which may affect
various flavours of the documentation at the beginning of the cycle
and then seeking to customise them for the different flavours later in
the cycle, as Jim has proposed.

Obviously at the same time we need to bear in mind that we have
personnel limitations to work with as well, so we need to make sure
that the processes we have in place are suited to work for a small
group of people all of whom are contributing when and as they have
some spare time. I don't think we're doing *too* badly at that, but
obviously we can discuss improvements to the processes where these are
scalable.

(I think the issue which you also touch on of confusing users is a
logically separate one. I don't think that we're confusing users by
producing separate documentation for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and
Edubuntu. I think users will expect that. Obviously, we may well be
confusing them in other ways (e.g. by distinguishing between
help.ubuntu.com and help.ubuntu.com/community), but that should be the
subject of a separate thread.)

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