[CREATE] LGM11 panel proposal: attracting new devs

[Gregory Pittman]

On 02/20/2011 07:57 AM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> documenters is a problem -- and that is purely my fault. I've tried to 
> write the manual on my own, but I don't have time.
This is certainly a worthy aspect of any discussions. At Scribus, we 
have had something of an evolutionary development of documenters and 
documentation, one offshoot being the publishing of an official manual, 
but I think documentation needs to be more than that, but it may differ 
from one project to another.

One central issue is what kinds of documentation are useful to users. We 
ended up making the printed manual since there were many who insisted 
that they really wanted/needed this format. Yet, as you are using an 
application, there are other kinds of quick reference or maybe some in 
depth understanding about some facet of the application or its use that 
you would like to access. Sometimes you have internet access, sometimes 
you don't. We have a wiki, but a wiki can become a sprawling monster 
that must be fed (updated) to keep it alive and relevent.

My personal biased view as a documenter is that, while it isn't the same 
as writing code, it really is an integral part of development, 
especially with highly complex and capable software. One hopes that it 
can progress in tandem with the code, by necessity a bit behind 
cutting-edge features, and like code should have a modular structure, 
ideally documentation should have a structure that allows for easy 
multipurposing and reuse of materials. I don't think we are there yet, 
but I would like to see us move in that direction. Already we have been 
a more active participant in documentation updates and "bugfixes" coming 
with svn code updates and bugfixes

Greg.