Spent some time thinking about this (wiki vs Sphinx) and after all I agree with Brecht & Thomas as well.
On a first look, the instructions for building the manual might make the appearance as if there was quite some work needed, but this really isn't the case. It's mostly a matter of copy-pasting 3-6 commands (including cd commands). Don't remember how long the build time was, but I doubt it would take anyone longer than ~30 mins to get everything set up. Again I think it is much easier than it may seem. Maybe some video tutorials could illustrate this a bit better. Sphinx isn't no magic bullet, but I don't think wiki is either. And regardless of the amount of individual contributors, I think the manual is in a pretty good shape now :) Just my two cents. Cheers, - Julian - On 27 February 2016 at 23:35, Dan McGrath <danmcgrath...@gmail.com> wrote: > Lets not forget the fact that the new manual ultimately is a bunch of plain > html (well, not all, but static at least) files here, no php to crash, > hack, upgrade blah blah. Speed-wise, it's hard to beat the performance for > this type of setup. > > Dan > > On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 4:52 PM Thomas Dinges <blen...@dingto.org> wrote: > >> I agree with Brecht here. >> >> The entry barrier is a bit technical, agreed. But following the steps on >> how to set it up in the Manual, it was a 5 minute job. >> After that it's not difficult anymore. Visually the new manual is much >> better and well structured, I missed that in the old wiki. >> >> Best regards, >> Thomas >> >> Am 27.02.2016 um 22:48 schrieb Brecht Van Lommel: >> > I'm a bit surprised that the manual is coming up as an issue now, >> > there's been a lot of good work done there in the past few months. >> > >> > Even if it's just a few people doing most of the work, in my opinion >> > that's just how most open source projects work. A small dedicated core >> > and then smaller contributions from other. And I see commits from >> > developers like Bastien, Thomas, Dalai, Gaia, Julian, Tamito and >> > contributions from other people too. I don't think the wiki manual was >> > more active? >> > >> > It would be good if the barrier could be lowered, maybe including >> > sphinx python modules in the svn report, a Blender addon to help, I >> > don't know. And certainly I would like all developers to document >> > their work in the manual directly. >> > >> > But in my opinion the result is already much better than what we had >> > in the wiki, without so much wrong information, broken links, warnings >> > about reorganizations that never happen, etc. >> > >> > >> > >> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:02 PM, Campbell Barton <ideasma...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 2:45 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey....@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> So the actual issue is a lack of coordination work for contributors >> and the >> >>> reason why Manual is still in a reasonable shape is simply only >> because all >> >>> the contributors are scared away and now it's 1.5 people only working >> on it. >> >> The changes that have been made had some review first and corrections >> >> made before being committed. >> >> >> >>> f we'll do better coordination work, then Wiki documentation will not >> be a >> >>> disaster at all. >> >> Maybe so, on the other hand the wiki had a long time to prove its self, >> >> and after many years never gave very usable documentation. >> >> >> >> I think we just don't have enough people interested and capable to >> >> write (and more importantly maintain) documentation on *any* system. >> >> >> >> At this point though the new manual seems to be so unpopular that >> >> (even though I personally find it nice to work with). >> >> >> >> This seems strange since for Blender we have 4gig of libs, or >> >> install_deps scripts... boost, >> >> yet for documentation installing a Python package is unacceptable or so. >> >> Almost nobody (close to none of the developers) is really interested >> >> to even bother installing Sphinx and trying to use it. >> >> >> >> Can we just give up and declare ourselves incapable of maintaining >> >> documentation entirely? >> >> Move back to the wiki? leave existing docs to bit-rot? >> >> >> >> If there is no support for the current system, >> >> I'm not sure if we can expect anything to improve. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> >> Bf-committers mailing list >> >> Bf-committers@blender.org >> >> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Bf-committers mailing list >> > Bf-committers@blender.org >> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Bf-committers mailing list >> Bf-committers@blender.org >> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers >> > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > Bf-committers@blender.org > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
