new apps without docs: policy request

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

For this release cycle, a few new apps and utilies
have been added, and it seems none of them have any
sort of documentation.
This puts a bit of pressure on the documentation team,
which is still running on a skeleton crew. There are
still many applications with outdated docs (eg gedit),
as well as new features to be documented.

I can see the rationale might be that if an
application's developer asked the GDP to write a
manual earlier in the cycle, the GDP might consider it
a waste of time to write a manual for an untried
application that might not be in the GNOME release.
On the other hand, I'd rather waste time early in the
cycle when there's very little documentation work to
do, than have an extra heap of work in the final month
when things get stressful. And even if an application
isn't added to the official GNOME release, it's still
used by distros and available at large: so it's not
work wasted.
Also, some of the apps this cycle are hardly new and
untried: AlaCarte for example is already in Ubuntu
Dapper.

I also think that just as the release team wouldn't
consider an app or utility that was buggy, or
incomplete, or had poor HIG compliance, so it should
also consider a user manual to be a key feature of an
application.

How do the other members of the GDP feel about this?
Shaun, is this something we can pass on to the release
team for next cycle?


		
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