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

[Thomas Dinges]

I agree with Brecht here.

The entry barrier is a bit technical, agreed. But following the steps on 
how to set it up in the Manual, it was a 5 minute job.
After that it's not difficult anymore. Visually the new manual is much 
better and well structured, I missed that in the old wiki.

Best regards,
Thomas

Am 27.02.2016 um 22:48 schrieb 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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