Re: bonobo-activation doc build fixes

[Bill Councill <bill councill cbseng com>]

Hi Darin et al - 

I really feel much sympathy for you at this particular moment. You've
been asked to perform the the equivalency of a full time configuration
manager on your subproject and you admittedly lack some of the skills
necessary to manage the job successfully.

Many configuration managers find themselves in the same position.
Without sufficient education--much more than a week's seminar--most
configuration managers remain lost and ineffective. Their companies
suffer without the knowledge that a greater financial and resource
investment in configuration management (CM) would positively impact
return on investment and time to market considerably.

The IEEE publishes a standard on CM. It would be well worth the money to
purchase the standard; it will save you much time and wasted effort.
Most books on software configuration management derive much of their
material from the IEEE standard. The standard is available at most
university libraries and can be purchased directly from the IEEE
Publications division.

I have been reading e-mail distributed by your listserver. I've noticed
the lack of formal software process; configuration management is an
example. I recognize that in the Open Source movement, you don't want to
subject programmers to many, extensive standard processes, especially
requiring lots of reporting. Individualization is prized. But, in some
areas, such as configuration management, there must be standardization
of the configuration management of source code; otherwise, four or five
builds may eventually comprise a product version. And, when customers
ask for defect repairs, finding a way to make those repairs through all
that spaghetti is next to impossible.

I would recommend that before you go further, a group of senior Bonobo
developers develop a configuration management policy. To keep the policy
simple, borrow extensively from the 1998 version of the IEEE's Software
Standards Manuals. Then, your whole organization will know how to
implement the tenets of configuration management, especially, the
ability to check in and check out source code and other software assets
correctly. 

Additionally, there are now Web-based applications on the market that
can assist you to manage large numbers of software assets: source code
and descriptive documentation. I am using a program entitled
SourceOffSite (SOS). It is relatively inexpensive for UNIX-based
workstations and almost flawless in design. I use the Windows version
that sits on Visual SourceSafe and never have problems. Clients are
either Web-based or client-server based. The producer was SourceGear;
they have just been acquired by a larger company.

I hope this missive has been helpful.

Bill Councill
bcouncil cbseng com
Co-editor and an author of "Component-Based Software Engineering:
Putting the Pieces Together," Addison-Wesley, 2001

Darin Adler wrote:
> 
> On 2/1/02 12:43 PM, "Havoc Pennington" <hp redhat com> wrote:
> 
> > However until gtk-doc has this feature I think putting in my patch is
> > right, since things don't work at the moment.
> 
> You should commit. This is the kind of change I'm comfortable approving in
> my "junior bonobo-activation maintainer" role :-)
> 
> > Also, the template files need to be committed, the ones in CVS are
> > behind the latest that gtk-doc will generate. I can do that if you
> > want.
> 
> I guess you should do it. I can never figure out, when I get different
> templates on my system, whether I have newer or older gtk-doc, so I'm shy
> about committing those.
> 
>     -- Darin
> 
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