Motion to move Feature Freeze to July 23rd

[Eduardo Patto Kanegae]

hi folks,

As suggested by Daniel I´m forwarding some comments I sent him.
I will not be able to attend the next IRC meeting ( 13-july) but I can 
read its log later.

Let me know how can I help.


Eduardo Patto Kanegae

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-DEV] Motion to move Feature Freeze to July 
23rd
Date: 	Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:30:49 -0400
From: 	Daniel Morissette
To: 	Eduardo Patto Kanegae
CC: 	Howard Butler, Jeff McKenna


hi Eduardo,

I have taken the liberty of CC'ing Howard and Jeff who are the leads on 
the documentation front.

I think you got the picture right and I also think more help on the docs 
front would be very welcome, but I am not the right person to tell you 
where to place your efforts or to decide on what changes can or cannot 
be made (this is really Jeff and Howard's territory).

As you may have seen in my other email I have put the documentation 
topic on the agenda for the IRC meeting that we are trying to schedule 
for this Friday. Perhaps a good first step might be to participate in 
the IRC meeting and share your ideas there.

I'd invite you to also share your ideas on the mapserver-dev list.

Daniel


Eduardo Patto Kanegae wrote:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

> Hi Daniel,
> 
...
> 
> Sometimes I think MapServer development is running too much faster than 
> documentation process.
> So, the results I see is that documentation of MapServer ( current and 
> new features) can sometime be confused for new users.
> 
> mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/ folder has a lot of references, guides, 
> how-to´s but some new features or nice tricks
> still keep stored only on RFC´s pages or even within mail messages.
> 
> If Plone is not so easy, isn´t there any attempt to port current or new 
> docs to a new doc system? ( wiki pages? .tex? )
> 
> I feel comfortable on wiki sintax, even can learn 'latexing' too or can 
> edit on Plone if needed ( I´ve been working with MamboServer / Joomla 
> for the last ~5 years and Plone might not be so diferent ).
> 
> Feel free to contact me.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Eduardo Patto Kanegae
> 
> 
> Daniel Morissette wrote:
>> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>>>
>>> I would also like to comment that I would like to see additional 
>>> developer documentation in rough added but developers of new 
>>> features, especially those that do not have additional feature 
>>> development work to do. While I know the RFC is supposed to help in 
>>> this areas it is far from complete and often not useful from the how 
>>> to use the feature perspective. I think this is critical on multiple 
>>> fronts:
>>>
>>
>> I agree that developers need to document their work and am often 
>> frustrated by features committed without docs or even a proper ticket 
>> comment.
>>
>> Personally I think of a RFC as exactly what you describe as developer 
>> docs. I think it should be a requirement of a RFC to contain enough 
>> information and examples for users to be able to use it, so if you 
>> have a specific RFC in mind that doesn't contain enough information 
>> then perhaps this RFC needs an update.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I'm not against better organized dev docs, but 
>> we'd need a volunteer to take the lead on that... and at least in the 
>> meantime we have RFCs.
>>
>>
>> Actually, talking of docs, the main problem I see is the lack of a 
>> place to put new and updated docs for new features during development. 
>> I am planning to update the Plone site docs with the new features that 
>> I added to 5.0 but I can't do that since the docs on the site are for 
>> v4.10. I think we'd need versioning for the docs on the site, but last 
>> time we talked about that it seemed that Plone isn't very friendly 
>> about that. Any news on a good way to handle this from the Docs people?
>>
>> Daniel



Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Daniel Morissette wrote:
>> Personally I think of a RFC as exactly what you describe as developer 
>> docs. I think it should be a requirement of a RFC to contain enough 
>> information and examples for users to be able to use it, so if you 
>> have a specific RFC in mind that doesn't contain enough information 
>> then perhaps this RFC needs an update.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I'm not against better organized dev docs, but 
>> we'd need a volunteer to take the lead on that... and at least in the 
>> meantime we have RFCs.
>
> Steve,
>
> I'm kind of with Daniel on this.  In particular, I don't want a new
> class of intermediate developer generated documentation to manage.  I
> think we should either "put it in the RFC" or draft it directly into the
> final documentation.
>
> Best regards,