[Bf-docboard] Plans for the Future

[Stefano Selleri]

Well,

I've exchanged some thoughts with people at BF. We need to think of what the BF-docboard is doing.

The current workflow ha strength and weakness:

Strength:
- Centralized process, everything is checked twice :)
- Reliable standard, with easy translation to html, PDF (?) etc.

Weakness:
- Hard to use (at best) new contributors are scared. Time spent in making things work is
a non-negligible percentage of total time.
- Centralized process (yep, this is a drawback too), this leads to dead times, within submission, evaluation and pubblication
- Akward pubblication. To change something online I have to upload all stuff from scratch. THis is a hundred of Megabytes or more.

We are thinking about changing standards.

One possible is wikimedia, the one used for wikipedia (NOT the one for the wiki at blender.org). This allows an easier contribution, since anyone can commit changes, and it is possible to roll back if something bad happens. It is anyway a standard one must learn to write in. I've been told that images are not that easy to handle.

Another possibility is OpenOffice, this ies easier to use, since it is offline, but harder to manage, since it is offline :), and harder to have an uniformly styled output.

I would like to have opinions from boarders on these two, and possible suggestions of other approaches within this week.

Next release (2.37) is close Kenneth has indeed just finished the PET doc for 2.37. He is actually one of the few people actively writing. Many others are working on translations too, but this does not add new stuff ;)

So we are lagging a lot with respect to developers. I think we need to fill the gap! And to do this I think we really need to let people collaborate seamlessly, without CVS restriction bottlenecks.

Happy Blending

Stefano

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ing. Stefano SELLERI - DET - Univ. of Florence - Via Lombroso 6/17
50134 - Firenze. T. +39-055-4796751. F. +39-055-4796767
------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/attachments/20050530/994ce269/attachment.htm