Hi, I'm quite concerned about the state of developers-reference.
- I've basically been the only active maintainer for over a year. - There are many open bugs, about things that should really be fixed or added in dev-ref, but I don't have time to address them (I'm doing "please provide a patch and I'll integrate it"-maintainance). - There are more and more places where documentation about Debian development is being published: wiki pages, blogs, d-d-a, etc. While it might be good to keep developers informed, it's clearly not a good thing on the long term: you end up having to google for many d-d-a posts. We really need to do something about this. Documentation about Debian development plays an important role in the way we are perceived as "welcoming" to newcomers. Our procedures are getting more and more complex (use of packaging helpers like cdbs and dh7, use of VCSes), but our documentation doesn't improve. First, we need to decide whether we want to continue to maintain developers-reference. We could simply decide that it's deprecated, and use a set of wiki pages to document our procedures. I see some value to a (mostly) self-contained documentation, but, if it helps getting contributions from more people, we could simply move to wiki.d.o. (or to a ikiwiki instance). I'm not a big fan of wikis, so I wouldn't continue to "maintain" dev-ref, but I'm open to the idea. If we decide to continue to maintain developers-reference, we should all participate. I'm not asking everybody to become co-maintainers (some help is probably needed, and would be welcomed, but I don't think that the main problem is here). Ideas: - When announcing a change of procedure to d-d-a, or information that is useful on the long term, prepare a patch for dev-ref at the same time. It doesn't need to be in docbook-xml (plain text or html would do). - When doing talks about something at Debconf or at another conference, take the opportunity to review and improve the corresponding dev-ref section. (That applies to the i18n chapter of dev-ref, which is apparently badly outdated). - Contributing to dev-ref could become a part of the NM process. We already have a "fix two RC bugs" question. We could have a "fix two dev-ref bugs" one. Any comments? -- | Lucas Nussbaum | lu...@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ | | jabber: lu...@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
