On 19/03/2019 00:32, Frank Sundermeyer wrote:

Hi,

my name is Frank, I am the project manager for documentation in SUSE. The whole doc team was on an offsite last week, so nobody from the team had a chance to respond so far.

This has become a long thread, so I hope you bear with me when I answer/ comment in a single mail rather than replying to several posts individually... . Thanks Frank for taking the time to reply, and apologies that this all blew up while you were at the offsite.

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On Tuesday, 12 March 2019 11:44:39 CET Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

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I usually read complaints about the bad state of openSUSE documentation. Ancor, this is a rather vague and general statement, can you please provide more details? Questions that immediately come to my mind are:

* Does this refer to the openSUSE manuals at http://doc.opensuse.org/ or to the openSUSE Wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/? Both? * Where have you read these complaints and have they been passed on to the Doc team or the Wiki team? If so, what happened to the feedback?

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Maybe we can use Season of Docs (the Google's equivalent to Summer of Code) to fix some stuff. Maybe we should first find out what needs fixing, where is this needed and how to integrate existing resources... .

I agree. Google's initiative is certainly interesting (and it's always nice to see people caring about open source docs), but it's also set up for groups and writers who have a plan in place, and processes to enable writers to contribute. At this point, we don't really have that. That said, assuming Google offer the program again next year, it could be feasible, if we have managed to get a community effort off the ground by then.

---------------- On Thursday, 14 March 2019 00:35:19 CET Lana Brindley wrote:

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that even the docs mailing list got shut down a little while ago We decided to shut it down because there was no traffic at all on this list for one year... . If needed/wanted, we can set it up again on short notice. Just let me know... Yes, please!

On Thursday, 14 March 2019 03:35:25 CET Lana Brindley wrote:

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Since there's no mailing list or IRC any more That is not true - #opensuse-doc on Freenode exists since many years and the SUSE doc team is present. Right now I see five people in that channel (including myself), and I've been sitting in there for close to nine months now, with no interaction. Seems like the definition of a dead channel to me. Slack has the extra added benefit of providing scrollback and threading, so it tends to work better for people in different timezones, because the conversation doesn't need to be synchronous like IRC. I also think there's value in being on the same platform as the Write the Docs community.

On Saturday, 16 March 2019 04:32:41 CET Lana Brindley wrote:

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Yeah, I'm very familiar with Docbook XML (less so daps), but it is very much a tech writer's toolchain. In my experience with upstream communities, switching to a markdown language can greatly improve contributions from non-tech writers. I know from personal experience that many discussions in the community (regardless of the topic) end in tools discussions. Before we open that can of worms, I suggest to concentrate on content, collaboration and processes first ;-D.

I agree, and having been through community-based conversation projects in the past, it's important to get the team structure and processes right first. It's an important consideration, though, and I don't want it to be forgotten in all the political discussion.

---------------- On Thursday, 14 March 2019 09:02:22 CET Sarah Julia Kriesch wrote:

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We had many questions on our wiki mailing list in the past how to contribute to the real documentation of openSUSE, because this documentation is only editable by the SUSE documentation team. This is no longer true since more than 3½ years (June 2015). Since then, _all_ SUSE product documentation is publically hosted on GitHub and licensed under an openSource license (GFDL, Apache 2.0, Creative Commons). The SUSE doc team happily accepts pull requests, bug reports and other help. The openSUSE documentation that is hosted on http://doc.opensuse.org/, for example, is hosted at https://github.com/SUSE/doc-sle (SLES, SLED, and openSUSE documenation are generated from the same source). I suspect from this conversation thread that the invitation to make PRs to the doc team hasn't been well publicised. Another issue I see is that while the documentation is living in github, it's not being treated as docs-as-code, but rather long-form documentation, which makes it much harder to make quick patches.

Again, we are open for cooperation and collaboration. We have NO intention at all to exclude the community.

BTW: The complete doc toolchain the doc team is using is also hosted on GitHub and is used by people from outside SUSE. The _complete_ work the SUSE doc team does is public and transparent for everyone.

This is great, and it gives us a really good starting point for a community effort.

On Thursday, 14 March 2019 10:33:46 CET Sarah Julia Kriesch wrote:

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We know about the friendliness. 2 years ago we should receive 1 guy for the integration of openSUSE Contributions and a better cooperation between the SUSE Documentation Team and our wiki team. [...] We didn't watch any Contributions in the wiki by the special SUSE Documentation Team Member. We tried the integration, but that was not possible. I was involved in these conversations and supported the solution you mentioned above. In hindsight, it would have been better to not make this promise. Not because we did not want to help. Quite the opposite. We made this promise because we really _wanted_ to help. Back then the doc team was under heavy work load (and it still is). We had hoped to find time to squeeze in the work for the wiki (because we wanted to). It turned out that it did not work out. And still does not. I should have let you know about this much earlier. I failed to do so and you have every right to be angry about us not fulfilling our part of the agreement. But be rest assured that it was not done because of disrespect for the community, but because of lack of resources.

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On Thursday, 14 March 2019 10:06:57 CET Simon Lees wrote:

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But still it is technically possible to create a pull request. Yes! And bug reports, if you prefer that.

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But really it would be best to discuss the best way forward with the documentation team, they maybe willing and happy to accept pull requests as is they may also be completely unprepared and not have the man power to review a significant number of pull requests. Reviewing pull requests is part of our daily work and should be doable (unless you do not attempt to rewrite everything with several hundered requests ;-D). We may not always react within hours, but no work will be lost or ignored. the same is true for bug reports - they will usually take longer to get fixed, but we will not ignore them.

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Maybe it makes sense to do the work in some other "New openSUSE feature branch", Our tool chain and DocBook XML make it possible to create parts of the documentation that is only valid for one product flavor (openSUSE in this case). This is true for single words, sections, chapters or even whole guides. Therefore adding openSUSE-specific content should not be a problem. That's quite an unwieldy feature in Docbook, but it's a good beginning. at worst its possible to fork the documentation into openSUSE's github I hope it will not come to this - all parties would lose in this case. I agree, and as I said in an earlier mail it only makes sense if the internal docs team is hostile to patches, which it would seem you are not.

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There might be other ways as well, but the best people to work that through with is SUSE's documentation team. That would really be appreciated. And I am volunteering to continue this discussion with you - just let me know where (in case it is moved somewhere else).

I think the suggestion was to move to opensuse-web, so I have added them to this mail. Lana -- Lana Brindley Technical Writer - SUSE Manager "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-web+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-web+owner@opensuse.org