[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting minutes - February 27, 2016

[Brecht Van Lommel]

I'm a bit surprised that the manual is coming up as an issue now,
there's been a lot of good work done there in the past few months.

Even if it's just a few people doing most of the work, in my opinion
that's just how most open source projects work. A small dedicated core
and then smaller contributions from other. And I see commits from
developers like Bastien, Thomas, Dalai, Gaia, Julian, Tamito and
contributions from other people too. I don't think the wiki manual was
more active?

It would be good if the barrier could be lowered, maybe including
sphinx python modules in the svn report, a Blender addon to help, I
don't know. And certainly I would like all developers to document
their work in the manual directly.

But in my opinion the result is already much better than what we had
in the wiki, without so much wrong information, broken links, warnings
about reorganizations that never happen, etc.



On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:02 PM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 2:45 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So the actual issue is a lack of coordination work for contributors and the
>> reason why Manual is still in a reasonable shape is simply only because all
>> the contributors are scared away and now it's 1.5 people only working on it.
>
> The changes that have been made had some review first and corrections
> made before being committed.
>
>> f we'll do better coordination work, then Wiki documentation will not be a
>> disaster at all.
>
> Maybe so, on the other hand the wiki had a long time to prove its self,
> and after many years never gave very usable documentation.
>
> I think we just don't have enough people interested and capable to
> write (and more importantly maintain) documentation on *any* system.
>
> At this point though the new manual seems to be so unpopular that
> (even though I personally find it nice to work with).
>
> This seems strange since for Blender we have 4gig of libs, or
> install_deps scripts... boost,
> yet for documentation installing a Python package is unacceptable or so.
> Almost nobody (close to none of the developers) is really interested
> to even bother installing Sphinx and trying to use it.
>
> Can we just give up and declare ourselves incapable of maintaining
> documentation entirely?
> Move back to the wiki? leave existing docs to bit-rot?
>
> If there is no support for the current system,
> I'm not sure if we can expect anything to improve.
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