[maemo-community] The role of the docmaster

[From: Murray Cumming]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 14:56 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> At the risk of "me too"ing, I've been loosely involved in various random
> parts of the Maemo documentation, and I've been a (often dissatisfied)
> reader of the rest. The problems are totally fixable. These would be my
> priorities:
> 
> 
> 1.
> Get a library.maemo.org up and running ASAP, like library.gnome.org. It
> would use mostly just published source tarballs.
> 
> That would end the weird practice of manual HTML uploads for each SDK
> release, with different versions of the same documentation at various
> random and unguessable URLs if they are uploaded at all.
> 
> 
> 2.
> Get the Nokia documentation people to use standard tools, such as
> DocBook XML, instead of half-generating stuff and then editing the HTML.
> That means, find someone to order them to do it, because they aren't
> figuring it out themselves so far - well some people are better than
> others. If they don't use a sane process then nobody can contribute.
> 
> library.maemo.org would show them how this should be done so they don't
> need to think about it.
> 
> And where they even want to work in the open this will give them a way
> to do that.
> 
> 
> 3.
> Widely publish direct links to submit Maemo documentation bugs in
> bugzilla without needing people to guess their way through the
> bugs.maemo.org maze to the correct product and component.
> 
> 
> 4.
> Get native English speakers to review documentation. At best it is just
> embarrassing - at worst it is incomprehensible. No non-native speakers
> can write perfect English, no matter how good they think they are.
> 
> 
> 5.
> Give the Nokia developers (and contractors) time to take documentation
> bugs seriously. I know that they are currently not allowed to spend time
> on them.

Dave, as docmaster could you give me some response to this?

-- 
murrayc at murrayc.com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com