Why not distribute the guide in a port?
On 22 Jun 2007, at 17:36, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
Hey Maun Suang!
Your recent work on the guide has caught my eye and made me very
interested! We've been trying to revive such an important
documentation effort for a while already with many false starts, so
first off I want to thank you for taking a real lead in it!
Landon and I have been talking about putting the guide back up on
our site once again even if it's not fully up to date, and start
improving it little by little, baby steps, 'cause every single
gigantic effort till this day to provide the project with the
greatest documentation ever in one fell swoop has failed. Therefore
baby steps to the rescue, just as you're doing right now! One of my
explicit goals with this mail is to encourage you to keep on
working on the guide as your spare time permits you and to assure
you that your time will not be wasted, at all!
There are of course the questions of where exactly we'd put the
generated guide (the html docs) and how we would go about
automating it's regeneration, which is something I already ping'd
Kevin Van Vechten on. Once I have some leads from him I'll get back
to you and this list with details.
One other topic is how we should integrate that source of
information with the Wiki, and on this I hope to not tread too
harshly on what's already been discussed many times before, of
which I don't have much track at all to be honest (and I apologize
to people involved for that!). In any case, Wiki docs being as
dynamic as they are, I was mainly thinking we should use the Wiki
solely for "How-To" type of documents, like how to setup a mail
server with MacPorts installed software and edit it as new
information and packages become available. On the other hand,
existing wiki documentation on the basics of how to use MacPorts,
how to become a member, how to properly submit tickets, Portfile
writing guidelines and the like should be moved to the guide if not
already there, officially and emphatically endorsed by the project
(not that the wiki isn't endorsed, but the guide seems to me like
more formal). Thoughts?
On the contribution topic, there are those with commit bit already
(who should feel free to dive in and and work on the official docs,
I'm sure peer review will help stabilize things) and those who
don't have +commit but still might want to contribute. I see many,
many solutions to the latter, so many in fact that I fear this
thread getting lost in endless discussion on how to channel it, as
it's happened before. I'll start by proposing the following: I
create a "Documentation" milestone up in the roadmap, where users
can upload either patches and/or comments on the docs (in case they
don't know how to create patches) and committers review and apply
them as appropriate; those contributors without +commit and with a
good record get promoted to project membership. On the wiki side of
things, I'll fulfill one of my promises and coordinate with kvv an
easier way of granting wiki write privileges to a selected subset
of people whom we approve to write wiki documentation, so that "how-
to" documents are also fluently created and maintained.
Again, I'm really fearing loosing this thread to endless debate
once again, so I'll go ahead and start with the outlined plan
unless someone proves me that it is fundamentally flawed because of
<insert your best possible argument here>. If it happens to fall
short of ideal, we can always improve it as we move along, but I'm
sure we would all appreciate at least *some* forward progress on
the sorry state of our documentation over nothing at all.
So, people (Maun Suang ;-), start your engines!
-jmpp
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
