Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Recruitment for Base (Was Re: [steering-discuss] Base - a new mailing list?)

Hi Tom,

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I think we need to attract people to work on the documentation as well as the code.
>
> Documentation is not as good as it could be because the Documentation Team has not been able to 
> really work at it.  There are bits&pieces scattered around the internet but unlike the other apps 
> there is no guide that brings it all together.  I'm not sure what is meant by "professionals".  
> Is this a suggestion that we hire some paid staff or consultants to do the Base Guide?  If so 
> then I would suggest paying Alex, Planas, Andreas, Regina or someone like that as they already 
> have experience with Base and are more likely to have a clue what they are talking about than an 
> outsider.

Well, one thing we are lacking, in terms of documentation, is material
that gives a general and/or a detailed overview of the technical
design of the LibreOffice suite, which would allow potential
contributors to get their head around how to jump in. AFAIK, you need
some familiarity with the suite's architecture and design, or
sufficient development experience to be able to figure it out for
yourself, before you can envision hacking code for LibO.

It's true that you might get some useful mentoring from the devs on
IRC, and that there is also not-widely-known-about API documentation
available at [1].

The reason for this is that a) the LibreOffice docs team has not had
time and resources to develop such documentation, and that - in any
case - the suite's software design has been evolving (move away from
Java), so it was not really the time to get into such an initiative.
Plus, user documentation has been seen as the primary need.

But, in the medium term, we would indeed need to develop some software
design documentation for the LibreOffice software.

Now, who's to do it? And when? Difficult questions to answer,
especially when the docs team is so short-handed in terms of
contributors. And it would require close liaison with the devs. I'm
not sure it's a problem that can be fixed simply by throwing money at
it. Does TDF even have the resources and will to do so? Not sure about
that either...

However, Tom, in any case, you're basically right that documentation
is one of the problems to be solved.

[1] http://docs.libreoffice.org/

-- 
David Nelson

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