it's puzzled me how much effort some of us have been putting in /normative/ documentation of policy, process, roles and responsibilities. It must be a programmer thing :D
<soapbox> Who needs "normative" documentation? Why?
- the board knows what incubation means - the incubator PMC knows what incubation means - many members and committers know what incubation means
there's no need to explain incubation to these people; they won't read the docs anyway, especially not when they're long (and normative docs are long).
We need documentation to explain incubation to projects that are/will be incubated, and we need documentation to explain it to members and committers who don't know what it means. In general, these people prefer to read informative docs.
*Normative documentation is only useful in case of a conflict that cannot be resolved otherwise.*
In all other instances, informative documentation is much more productive, and much more fun (for most people).
As we can resolve conflicts quite easily by other means (in 99% of cases, a simple statement by (someone from) the PMC can be quite effective), we don't normally have any conflicts to start with (just questions), and we're not building a compiler, we can thus conclude that normative documentation is not the most useful. </soapbox>
Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating. Its real cool there's people volunteering to write all this stuff, and the drafts are not *that* formal. I'm just suggesting we make it easy for ourselves and don't try to write "perfect" and "waterproof" docs. We just need "good enough".
back to my corner!
cheers,
- LSD
PS: I must be out of my mind, commenting at all on people finally doing the required work! Tsk! Back to my corner indeed!
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