Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation

[Jim Campbell]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Dougie Richardson
> <dougierichardson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> There's a massive turn over in contributers, a whole load of people I
>> haven't from in ages, documentors fell flat on its face despite the
>> time we put in to it, suggestions to improve workflow, processes and
>> get more contributers consistantly hit a dead end.
>
> I don't think things are as bad as that. In fact, I think that we've
> had quite a good release cycle, considering the fact that we're a
> purely volunteer based team the docs are in very good shape (I can't
> speak for other flavours but I'm personally pretty impressed by the
> accuracy of the Ubuntu docs). There are a few good contributors coming
> through and we're learning about how to improve our own internal
> documentation and processes. We are getting quite a few bug reports
> and fixing them relatively quickly, which is good.
>
> That's not to say that we can't improve, every team can always
> improve. Every team has squabbles every now and again too, but that
> doesn't mean that it's ineffective. It's just life.
>
> --
I agree with Matthew's comments above.  For a long time I think the
mailing list was kind of quiet.  We haven't even had team meetings in
a few release cycles.  In a way, it is just part of the development of
the team.  Also, not to say we can't make improvements on how we seek
out and develop new participants, but I think most all open-source
projects suffer from lack of people-power.

As for the bigger discussion, I've tried to look at this issue from a
couple of different perspectives, but I remain stuck somewhere in the
middle, leaning toward just having all of our doc packages in the same
project, cleaning up the cruft of personal branches that aren't being
used, and seeing if we can find a way to limit a person's bug mail to
$my-favorite-flavor-doc bugs only.

I do think it's beneficial for core-doc members to see all the bug mail.

In regards to Cody's mention that it's hard to find the Xubuntu
documentation in the Ubuntu-docs launchpad project, I will say that I
think there are too many personal branches in the ubuntu-docs
repository page that haven't been touched in a long time, and they
make it hard to find the actual documentation branches that are in
development.  We should remove some of the cruft from that page.

At my level of experience, and with the current status of the team, I
think that having all of the flavors under one project invites the
most collaboration, even if the same level of collaboration is
technically possible from bzr using separate projects.

As for the technical side of things, has the fact that the different
documentation flavors have been together under one project limited us
in any way?  I doubt it.  Launchpad processes may have some impact,
but they are probably the least of our current limitations, I think.

I've kept things brief, but that's my take on things for now.

Jim