Yesterday I attended annual OSDN.UA conference in Kiev, Ukraine. I was talking about KDE4 technology and plans.
I couldn't resist speaking about KDevelop a bit so I revealed some KDevelop4 information ;) Most common questions were "why are you replacing of autotools?" and "what will happen with multimedia?".
After the talk I was communicating with the people and here I'd like to present a short summary.
First, KDE users asked for a simple way for them to participate in writing documentation. What they did ask IMHO was like offline wiki engine for KHelpCenter. They'd like to be able to put some notes and text into the offline documentation. For example, KDevelop/Automake documentation section is unfinished. Users say they could have finished it (or at least write several centences just to share their experience). But currently they'd need to either modify docbook sources or figure out a documentation maintainer and send him an email with a text. What would users love is a way to put some text/comments into the documentation and then click one button and send a patch with their changes to the documentation maintainer automatically.
Also I talked to ReactOS developer. He said they'd like to have Qt/KDE compiled and used as a default desktop on their operating system. They're compiling the system with MinGW32 compiler so I think Qt4 should work and KDE4 should work as well (when ported to win32).
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2 comments:
Offline wiki engine? Why not an *online* wiki engine? Wiki and programming documentation are a perfect match, and I am at a loss to explain why nobody else has tried it yet. The closest I've seen is the MySQL documentation, where everybody can leave comments at the bottom of each doc page. And the comments often turn out to be more useful than the docs.
People always complain about the lack of good documenation for open source code, and a documentation wiki is the perfect answer to that problem. Developers don't want to write documentation, but users do and they will if you only give them a chance. Ideally the wiki would be tied into SVN such that changes in the wiki docs were synchronized with the code comments and vice versa, but even just a plain wiki would be useful.
The idea of an "offline wiki" with a way to extract changes and send them to a maintainer is a step in the right direction, but I think you will get much more benefit by not bothering the maintainer with every little change to the docs. Just make it a real wiki and let the community do its thing.
Well, the original request came from ukrainian users who don't usually have persistant internet connection and their online time is usually limited. Therefore "offline" editing would be better. After that changes could be sent either to maintainer or to the docs themselves (in svn, ftp, whatever). It's just a question of having a way to edit docs (add comments) offline and then send changes back.
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