On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Christian Boos wrote:
- The online help on the Trac pages is mainly not existing.
I suppose you have seen the TracDev/ pages. Those pages could be always be
improved and refreshed, but it's not fair to say that the online help is non
existing...
Well, yes I have seen these. But the problem there is, that these pages
end, where the problems start. I'm a pretty experienced programmer and
able to find out a lot myself. The docs contain all the information I was
also able to find out by reading code, whereas everthing which I did not
find out is missing there as well.
I did not say this is useless, for beginners it may be a start, but I fear
beginners will much earlier than I find big walls stopping their progress.
For me time is the most limiting factor. If I don't find information in a
proper time span, I stop there and do something else. I have enough to do,
having about 600 tracker entries in JOSM alone.
- The examples may exist, but can't be found. Whenever I try Google to
find something related to Trac searching for API names or functions I
find lots of patches and bug reports, but never found anything helpful.
Well, trac-hacks is one source of inspiration, though not all plugins are
examples to follow...
The best examples are still in the Trac source code itself, you should have a
copy at hand and "grep" in it.
That may be an idea, yes. But if I would have a complete copy of every
project I work for, then I would need much larger harddisks. Google has to
find the SVN. Currently it seems not to find it as it should. You should
investigate why (or why not prominently - I usually do not read Google
pages 3-xxx). SVN and SVN revisions are very helpful when found in Google.
Google has a nice feature called the webmaster tools which helps to
analyze external links, internal links, relevance, click rate, search
terms and so on. For another site (BTW a Trac instance) we did some work
to get SVN found in Google including proper redirects for documentation in
SVN and so on. Result have been much improved ratings in Google.
- Asking questions on Trac-Devel seems to have no effect at all, as my
mail posted one week ago got not one reply.
Well, just bad luck, usually those questions *do* get answered, and if not,
just be patient or insistent... Some people prefer to use the #trac channel
on IRC for quick Q&A sessions (osimons is usually there and willing to help).
I know mail gets overlooked. For JOSM I answer every mail after at least 4
days when no other developer answered. Ignoring is not nice.
Ok, we could allow spidering on tags/trac-0.11, tags/trac-0.12, maybe even on
trunk though its a moving target, but we would need to fix
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/5177 first. And hope that t.e.o could take
the load ... (I think it should given the improvements we made to the
infrastructure).
The webspiders are gentle nowadays, so I would not care. If load is really
a problem later, then I think a solution could be found for this as well.
Finding a server for really good projects is no longer a problem today.
+ 3) make api-doc
I'll start working on that soon (http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/8695).
I did not suggest this, because this takes usually A LOT OF TIME and I
refuse to do so for JOSM myself. It is welcome to have a good doc, but I
do not expect it. After a while every developer learns to live with
examples and source and only slight documentation hints.
Since I first had contact to Trac development I have the impression, that
you actually don't want to have external developers (the admins know about
the trouble we had until I took over SpamFilter plugin). I can't
understand this, as Trac is really a good product.
Well, that's not true, we keep trying to improve this. For example we put a
lot of efforts in the last months for setting up an infrastructure allowing
easy cloning of the Trac repository (via hg or git,
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/9235), and this should make it easier for
people to contribute changes and for us to review contributions.
I can only state my opninion. I would find it nice, when you prove me
wrong in the future.
Of course, ideally we should have a larger "us", and that's really only a
You can't influence that really. Giving newcomers a bit more attention
surely helps. I'm in OpenSource business more than 20 years and got a
thick skin in this time, so I care for some parts of Trac even if I was
discouraged. But I fear this is not true for many others. I lost members
of development teams because of much less important reasons.
matter of someone being serious enough about investing time and energy into
the project. But even smaller contributions already help us a lot, be it for
ticket triaging, or the occasional fix or new feature, or even...
documentation improvements!
Don't count on others improving the documentation. It wont happen. For
JOSM people constantly request better online docs and always tell me what
support is missing for them to do it themselves. Over the time I
implemented lots of stuff, but the persons always vanished without writing
a single word (and here I talk about much easier end-user docs). Sometimes
there are people writting docs, but it is very seldom :-)
P.S. By sending a mail like this I hope to improve the situation. If I
would think it is hopeless, then I would simply ignore the whole stuff.
Ciao
--
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