Re: doctable's future

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, David Merrill wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 08:40:03PM -0600, John Fleck wrote:
> > Folks -
> >
> > Whatever happened to the discussion and planning some months back for
> > DocTable2?
> >
> > With the debacle earlier this week of someone writing docs for an app
> > that had already been written (but not posted to the doctable) I was
> > moved to spend a few moments cruising through it, and it seems a bit
> > dusty, as if it could use some love.

It could certainly use some updating.  I think the most important priority
here is to identify which docs still need work.  Here we need to make sure
that no docs are listed as needing a writer if that is not true.  If
somebody could go through the DocTable and make sure this part of it is
accurate, that would be a big help.  It would also be helpful to have a
list of docs which need writers.  We could post that on this list for
writers to pick from.

However, we probably don't want to spend too much effort on updating the
data in the DocTable or documenting the core GNOME application docs right
now.  This is because the DocTable should experience some significant
revision in the coming months, as will the documents themselves.  We have
a team of people working on a draft of a style guide (which is coming
along very well BTW).  If we have the time and resources, which I believe
we will, we will be revising most of our docs to use the suggestions in
this style guide.  Following the style guide will make the docs a lot more
readable, indexable, and translatable.  This will soon be a new discussion
on this list, when the style guide team presents their first draft for
discussion and revision, so I'll defer this discussion for now.

Developer docs, API docs, user docs which don't exist, or docs for
non-core GNOME applications (ie. apps which will ship new releases before
GNOME 2.0) are all great candidates for work.

As for the DocTable's future, we do have a design for DocTable2 which is
basically ready.  There has not been a rush to get it implemented however,
as we won't really need it for a while.  It will be used for tracking
documents for the GNOME 2.0 release.  For this, we will want to track work
not only by writers, but also by editors, indexers, etc.  I believe the
full discussion can be found in the archives of this mailing list.

> I'm afraid I've been negligent on keeping up with threads here, and I
> completely missed the one on DocTable. I have been working on
> something similar to track LDP documents. May I get a copy of the
> DocTable source and see if it would help me with what I'm doing?

I'll email you the tarball seperately.

Dan