Ubuntu desktop documentation scope and location

[Daniele Procida]

On 13 May 2022, at 21:53, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>> I was wrong, I am sorry. Discourse has not been the decided platform
>> yet. Since there is no ETA on a decision of future platform, we will
>> use help.ubuntu.com.
> 
> While I understand that there is no decision yet, I don't understand why you feel prevented from using Discourse in the meantime. I mean, discourse.u.c is there since long, and it's frequently used, also for various kinds of targeted documentation. (I know since I receive email copies for every single entry.) And I assume that Discourse is a more convenient tool for publishing English only documentation than manually written HTML is.

The problem is that Ubuntu documentation already suffers from a violation of the principle that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

You’ll find Ubuntu documentation relating to certain topics scattered across a quite unreasonable number of platforms and properties. It’s part of a vicious circle: it’s not clear where some documentation should be updated, so someone creates a new place, and now there’s yet another place competing for maintenance attention, and bound to decay.

No documentation should ever be maintained in more than one place. Any plan to create a new place will have to include a plan for consolidation and unification - including removal of existing material from other places - in order to be viable.

In the meantime, the best place is the place that exists already, while we gather strength and resources to tackle the problem in a co-ordinated and systematic way.

Regards,

Daniele