I'm actually working on trying to set up a forum for developers to point out bugs that have enough information on what needs to be done that the learning curve is significantly lowered. If this pans out, I'll be posting more about it.
This sounds like a great idea. I have been looking at contributing code to Mozilla as well, but basically hit a stone wall there :). I'm looking forward to it.
True. There used to be more developers on irc before, but the incessant review requests largely drove them off, as far as I can tell. Perhaps if we had a strict ban on such (in view of the existence of the request tracker), some could be induced to come back for a day a week or something....
If you ask me (but who's asking me ;p), if that is what can bring the coders back I don't see any reason not to... right?
* We need more good overview documentation:
Agreed. The problem is how to organize it and how to link to it from where... I wrote some overview docs at some point, and I don't even think they're linked to from anywhere on the mozilla.org site, in the wake of the site redesign.
Yeah, there are many such places, and I don't think the available documents are very well maintained either. Looking forward to the results of that documentation project. There was a nice documentation overview page somewhere, but... well, I can't find it anymore, because it is not linked anywhere -_-;;. It looked different from http://www.mozilla.org/docs/, basically had the same functionality but was better categorized... Ahwell.
This would need to be organized somehow -- we have a LOT of such components/services.... Suggestions on how? This is really the most serious problem with the docs we have -- finding what you want is hard.
Right. :)
And hard to find documents have less chance of being properly maintained.
I hope you will make a wiki (perhaps with limited access) or user reply sections (like php.net) in the new documentation page. That should help a little in keeping things up to date, it would make it easier to update documents.
- It would be nice if someone would quickly skim most of the docs and place a big "out of date" marker on those that are such. Then later begins the process of making them up to date, but the most important is to know if they are out of date.
If someone can generate a list of docs involved (already nontrivial), this could probably be done.... I agree that it's worth doing.
One could establish some kind of 'voting' system (access limited to active developers with good knowledge of the codebase)... If a Mozilla developer encounters a pretty much deprecated document while looking for other documentation he can mark it 'deprecated' or 'request for update' or something. If this can be done without too much effort, I think it will work...
And ofcourse, a publication date helps too :).
~Grauw
-- Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!! _______________________________________________ mozilla-documentation mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-documentation
