Official vs. community

[Doug Smythies]

On 2014.08.07 20:25 Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> On 08/07/2014 05:51 PM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>> Just read the log from yesterday's meeting.
>> 
>> http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting-2/2014/ubuntu-meeting-2.2014-08-06-17.01.moin.txt
>> 
>> One thing that caught my interest was the discussion on how we refer to
>> the various type of help resources.
>> 
>> As regards the "official" desktop and server docs, it's true that they
>> are typically not written and maintained by Canonical staff, but by
>> volunteer community members. In that sense they are just as much
>> "community" resources as the help wiki.

> Ubuntu is a community-run distribution.  Anything "official" in Ubuntu is only designated so because it has received
> official recognition by the community-run boards that recognize things as official parts of Ubuntu.  Documentation is no
> different than, say, the package archives used to generate the official ISO images.  Community written, community
> maintained, officially sanctioned.

> As long as the processes for (a) producing and publishing the docs is clear and itself documented, and (b) the process
> for participating in that process is also itself clear and documented, things are good as they stand.

> I'm not so sure if any of those processes are documented clearly.  At least I haven't found clear docs on them.  Having
> an officially sanctioned set of documentation is good.  It's how to get from A to B that seems to be murky.

For (b): One has to be a documentation committer.
 
For (a): I follow the instructions on the "how to be a documentation committer for the serverguide" web page. [1]
And the build instructions on the "build" web page. [2]

I never do anything that isn't written down, because if I don't follow instructions
I tend to forget something and make a mistake.

For the desktop package part of things the documentation committers "how to" reference is [3].

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/Repository/Members-Serverguide#Updating_help.ubuntu.com
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/BuildingDocumentation 
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/Repository/Members-Desktopguide