GNOME Help Plans

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Hi all,

I've just added the following to all the pages in gnome-help:

  <revision pkgversion="3.0" version="3.0.1"
   date="2011-04-06" status="outdated"/>

It's not to say that the pages are all actually outdated. We
just don't have a status identifier for "Shaun got sloppy so
he could get 3.0 out, and now he doesn't know what's really
final and what just got marked final so he could release, so
we have to go back through everything a bit more carefully
this time and get things right."

I also updated the check_status.sh script to only match on
the version="3.0.1" revisions.

You should take "outdated" just to mean "Shaun hasn't yet
done a 3.0.1 review." I'm going to work my way through all
the pages, add comments, set statuses, and flood this list
with things people can do.

We have a lot of pages that are well-written, but could use
some better navigation and linking. We have some pages that
are subpar, that use incorrect terminology, or that provide
directions that aren't congruent with how we direct people
to do things on other pages. A lot of this review involves
having a very big picture of the entire help in your head.

I will mark final again any patches that I didn't write and
that I think are top-notch. Any pages that I wrote a large
portion of and I think are good will be candidate. Everything
else will be back to incomplete, along with comment elements
detailing what I'd like to see.

I'm not going to push things to final haphazardly for the
3.0.1 release. Status markers will be whatever they are for
that release. If you have stub or very incomplete material
you want to work on, please do it in .page.stub files, and
only move it to .page when it's review-worthy. We can mess
around more for 3.2, but for the 3.0.x life cycle, let's
keep the whole thing no less shippable than 3.0.0.

And speaking of 3.0.x releases, I will be doing them weekly.
I'll roll them every Sunday from now until we lose steam.
They'll get picked up on library.gnome.org, and hopefully
by our distributors.

There are also 29 .page.stub files. These are mostly things
that didn't get written in time. I'll probably add more as
I think of things during review. You should add them too.
Stub early, stub often. You don't need permission.

And so as not to end on a crack-the-whip note, I really want
to thank everybody who worked so hard on this. What we have
now is loads better than anything we've had for a very long
time. I could not have done anything like this alone, and
I'm really excited to have you all doing this with me.

Thanks,
Shaun