FreeLists / haiku-web / [haiku-web] Re: Trac (reevaluated)

["John Drinkwater" <jdrinkwater@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been reading since the list opened, and I'm normally quite quietâ

On 6/10/06, Waldemar Kornewald <wkornew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) wrote:
> > I could write reasonably good copy (although English is not my mother
> > tongue); I am also sure that there is talent out there that could do a
> > good job; you may need more than one person.
>
> The biggest problem is that we don't have good end-user documentation. The
> website is really a minor issue compared to this problem. If you want you can
> take over that task and organize a complete team to work on the documentation.
> A few people started the (unofficial) Haiku documentation here:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haiku
> It could become the official Haiku documentation.

If it does, can it move to our site/wiki ? I understand that it has
already been started there, but it would be nice if everything wasn't
distributed. Depending on reply and/or contact with the authors, I'll
do that "work".

> We also need people working on the HaikuBook (API documentation).

I haven't seen much of the documentation team recently; i've seen lots
of talk in the past about them doing a lot of work on the DocBook
system, have they folded?
I can offer to help here if the 'team' needs to be reformed.

> I don't always have enough time to watch everything, so I fear that it
> could get
> out of control and people start adding overloaded content to the wiki
> and in the
> end we remove 90% of it, so everyone gets frustrated and stops adding content
> (over-exaggerated scenario).

Which is why we should encourage users to contribute, some of which
will inevitably become "managers" of the wiki. You can never stop
people treading on each others toes, but as long as everyone knows the
rough rules and etiquette, things should be fine. The next thing to do
is some Wiki guidelines maybe? Something short and simple that users
can read before their first edit.

Maybe something like:
* Keep things short and simple.
* Only cover technology in detail if it is needed. Otherwise links are
good! We'd love to appeal to everyone.
* If you make a mistake, things can always be correctly.
* Read discussion (Talk:) pages before edits, people might have
decided not to do what you're about to.

> > I see there is an outline under "Layout" in the wiki, but has this been
> > thoroughly discussed? Is the leadership of the project happy with it?
>
> I once proposed something that the leadership liked. The wiki has an improved
> version of this.

And I doubt the wiki contributers can't improve upon it still.

> > would rather see resources put into accommodating localization of
> > content than migrating from Bugzilla to Trac which, I have to agree with
> > Axel and Michael here, should be lower priority as what we have does
> > work adequately and there is no compelling reason to change; I think
> > putting all the resources of the team into creating the new site.
>
> Charlie and Mikael are Python and Trac developers. It would not make a lot of
> sense to put them on a Rails project. We want to switch to something better
> than Bugzilla, anyway (there's even a bug report for this). We don't lose
> anything if they work on Trac.

Has Haiku picked Trac now? Would it be an idea to learn Python in case?
Is it going to be CMS+Trac? (does that mean RailFrog+Trac?)
Maybe we can ask for donations to support our server hosting the SVN,
it would at least motivate the upgrade to Trac.

> You're requesting a lot, but most of us are very busy with real-life. If you
> want to change something then please contribute. Organize a team. Do what you
> suggested. You seem to have enough time. Is that okay? And could you please
> stop nagging? Do something. Thanks a lot!

He's not nagging, he's asking how come parts of this project are
closed-room. I don't think that's an unreasonable request. It does
tend to make things doubly hard, because someone comes along to
suggest "Hey, what about my new site design", and people reply "Oh
yeah, someone else is already working on it...". If people had known
that, they wouldn't have ! :)

Just to bring up a few pointsâ
Koki has been trying to see where the website will go because
obviously he *does* want to contribute. We don't have provision atm
for a foreign language on the site, so that explains part of his
reasoning.
Sicutdeux also wanted to help with translating the site content, he's
even started on it here in Spanish (
http://wiki.haikudocs.org/doku.php )

People *are* trying to help, we're just not making it easy for them.

John
(stops nagging)

> Bye,
> Waldemar Kornewald
>
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