2008/8/28 Archie Cobbs <archie@dellroad.org>:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Dirk Stöcker <opensuse@dstoecker.de> wrote:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
The minimum I would expect ist that the page http://en.opensuse.org/Category:Build_Service
has entries to relevant information or to a link list pointing to further non-wiki information.
It's a wiki. Fell free to add the missing parts.
Michael, is there enough documentation that he can do it? Can you point Dirk to some of it so that he can consolidate that information? Or do you expect him to read the source code?
I don't mind reading source code to document, but I plainly don't have the time to document openSUSE BuildService. I don't find lots of time to document my own stuff, so why should I do so for things others made? Especially if these others are an commercial company.
I have to chime in with a "me too" here... warning: strong opinion follows...
The OBS is an amazing project, and I think it has the potential to improve not only SUSE Linux but all versions of Linux in a meaningful and positive way. It also makes openSUSE more versatile than other distributions.
However, when I started using it I was quite shocked that it is so hard to figure out what is going on. People refer to all these mysterious settings and mechanisms on the mailing list, but they are not documented anywhere (findably). I was perfectly willing and eager to read the whole official OBS reference manual... except that it didn't exist.
Even worse, as a new user the last thing you want to do is to distract the experts who are working hard to provide this great service with annoying newbie questions. I think you speak of the client side and specialy the WebClient. You also have osc cmd line tool, but the "expert" area seems only edit XML data by the hand, i writted MonoOSC, not yed finish, but perhap's you will think it 's easiest for newbie, without go in extrmly complicated setting : http://sourceforge.net/projects/monoosc/ Also im curently writting developper docs for those want to use the wrapper of OBS API i writted in C# , a first preview can be see here : http://surfzoid.free.fr/freevbsoft/MonoOSC/Docs/
In my opinion this is a dangerous barrier to the success of this project... because like any other "network effect" project, the more people utilize and contribute to OBS the more valuable it will be. This project, like any other, needs to encourage new members and make them feel welcome instead of making them feel confused and like they're just being annoying.
In a perfect world, yes, the wiki would grow and organize itself. Clearly, that's not happening though... or at least, the wiki is not addressing the need completely.
So in my opinion this projects needs to STOP for a minute and think about how to improve basic documentation.
What is needed is an "OBS reference manual". Ideally, it should be included in the source repository and all changes to OBS should include updates to the documentation as well (a "live" document). There are tons of examples of other open source projects doing this and plenty of tools out there that support doing it.
Clearly Novell can dedicate a couple of resources to this task. It even makes obvious business sense, because OBS is a powerful differentiating technology for Novell. So why limit it's potential because of such a silly reason?
-Archie
-- Archie L. Cobbs --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org
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