Hi Tom, On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Tom Davies <tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > I think we need to attract people to work on the documentation as well as the > code. > > Documentation is not as good as it could be because the Documentation Team > has not been able to really work at it. There are bits&pieces scattered > around the internet but unlike the other apps there is no guide that brings > it all together. I'm not sure what is meant by "professionals". Is this a > suggestion that we hire some paid staff or consultants to do the Base Guide? > If so then I would suggest paying Alex, Planas, Andreas, Regina or someone > like that as they already have experience with Base and are more likely to > have a clue what they are talking about than an outsider.
Well, one thing we are lacking, in terms of documentation, is material that gives a general and/or a detailed overview of the technical design of the LibreOffice suite, which would allow potential contributors to get their head around how to jump in. AFAIK, you need some familiarity with the suite's architecture and design, or sufficient development experience to be able to figure it out for yourself, before you can envision hacking code for LibO. It's true that you might get some useful mentoring from the devs on IRC, and that there is also not-widely-known-about API documentation available at [1]. The reason for this is that a) the LibreOffice docs team has not had time and resources to develop such documentation, and that - in any case - the suite's software design has been evolving (move away from Java), so it was not really the time to get into such an initiative. Plus, user documentation has been seen as the primary need. But, in the medium term, we would indeed need to develop some software design documentation for the LibreOffice software. Now, who's to do it? And when? Difficult questions to answer, especially when the docs team is so short-handed in terms of contributors. And it would require close liaison with the devs. I'm not sure it's a problem that can be fixed simply by throwing money at it. Does TDF even have the resources and will to do so? Not sure about that either... However, Tom, in any case, you're basically right that documentation is one of the problems to be solved. [1] http://docs.libreoffice.org/ -- David Nelson -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted