On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 11:55, Sorin Burjan <sorin.burjan(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
Hello.
Silvia and me have created a DRAFT for
XWiki.org Documentation Standard
found at :
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/XWikiOrgDocumentationStandard
Even if I found your procedures smart and very conscientious, I am a little
bit afraid by them, and just wonder if these will not finally slow down the
documentation, since only very minor change can be done quickly. As everyone
knows, documentation is never what we d'like to do, and if you increase the
burden, it will probably not encourage improvements. My idea is that there
should be an additional intermediate editing situation, where you improve or
add a section in the current documentation directly without going to a draft
and review cycle (almost like when you fix a issue without vote when you
know what to do). You could also add precision when you read the
documentation and have failed to catch it, to avoid the next one to also
have the same trouble.
I have the impression that we loose the wiki nature of the collaboration by
using these procedures....
... and this could be a larger reflexion on the feature of XWiki since such
situation is not uncommon. I have already some idea about that, but I had
never have time enough to write them in details. Briefly, IMO we should
offer a feature that allows a document to have its current version not the
latest one, until the author of the latest version confirm his desire to
publish their changes. As you said, we never want to see unbacked bread, and
this is why, in some situation, direct publication is not appropriate. I
will not say more here since this is clearly another thread....
In order to move towards the final version, we need your input on 2 issues.
- For which project version we create & maintain documentation
- Which skins we are going to support in the documentation (latest/all)
Although, these issues were discussed in December 2009, no final result
came out of them.
http://markmail.org/message/ou7hgdiiwgayghku#query:+page:1+mid:ou7hgdiiwgay…
1. the project version (XE version for ex) for which the documentation
is created/updated/maintained.
We have several choices:
a) We make the documentation only for the latest version.
b) We make the documentation only for the latest version, and we
export the pages at release time and make it available as a zipped HTML
export so that people using the older version can refer to them.
c) We make the doc work the last 2 releases. That would be 2.3 and
2.4.
Note: If option b) is chosen then we need to add a step to the
release process. (export for every release)
For me b) is not an option, documentation is not written / updated on
release day, but before it, when the features are released in the Mx and RCx
versions. Since we start Mx of next release before release of previous one,
we cannot managed such versioning easily.
For now, to stay reasonable, I think we should do as we do in source code,
and mention the version were a feature is introduced or changed when
confusion should be avoided.
2. The skin used for documenting steps. This also
includes the screenshots.
Again we have several choices:
a) Document only for the latest default skin.
b) Document for all supported skins. Right now that would be Toucan
+ Colibri (not sure about Albatross, I don't think we've officially said
it wasn't supported).
Note: If option b) is chosen, this would mean 2 screenshots for the
same feature (one for each skin)
I doubt we could do b), reaching a correct a) is already an issue when the
default skin is upgraded.
Denis
The vote content was mostly taken from the markmail
link above.
If you have any other suggestions regarding this draft, please reply and
state your opinion. We need as much feedback as possible in order to
create a solid documentation standard.
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--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
eGuilde sarl - CTO