[Qgis-community-team] Removing third party providers algorithms from QGIS Docs

[matteo]

Hi guys,

> I know that those processing alg help pages are programmatically(?)
> generated by Alexander B (in bcc), because we did not have anything
> there, and it that way we at least had the list of parameters. The idea
> was that humans then could add more information. We had some discussion
> at that time to either put it all in separate files, or group them or
> one file (we started with separate files, exploding the number of
> resources for transifex).
> 
> In general: having our own docs gives us a chance to have some
> consistency, add our own text and images, they are translatable and
> potentially to be packaged in an offline help package (still on the todo
> list :-) ).
> 
> But we should(!) link to them from within QGIS, else I agree we should
> get rid of the burden to maintain them.

I agree with Harrissou: there is already a huge effort to maintain just
our algorithm docs (only speaking for Processing docs and not all the
manual). Maintaining also gdal/saga/ecc.. is too much for different reasons:

* some parameter changes and we have to update the docs by testing
what's new
* lack of docs from source (e.g. SAGA). If the source docs are poor
there is no way (and also reasons I'll say) for us to document them

> It is a community choice, I think, if in QGIS we should be linking to
> third-party docs or linking to QGIS docs (which then can link to the
> third-party docs).
> 
> We (as QGIS) really have a problem maintaining the docs.
> People outside the community often complain about sparce documentation,
> but (even with funding) we have problems keeping them up to date with
> the developers. We really need more help, both from developers (which
> more often should write some lines in the commit messages) and from
> users (which could try to write some text).
> Not sure if extra funding would help...

Besides a lack of funding I see a lack of people.. I don't know how else
we can attract more people to help documenting QGIS..

Cheers

Matteo