There is no You in Documentation - yet!

[Ali Lloyd]

>From the looks of things we've fixed about half of the documentation bugs
reported in the last year against 6.7 / 7.0 / 8.0. One of the reasons
documentation bugs were in the past not getting fixed as often as everyone
would like, as I suggest in the blog post, is that it was something of a
faff to alter the XML files, and the system was fairly fragile - a slight
error in reference number, for example, could cause a subsequent installer
build to fail. So yes, part of the reason for changing the format was so it
would be easier for *us* to fix docs bugs without breaking things.

We could probably drop everything and fix every outstanding documentation
bug in a couple of weeks. I must admit that a part of my reluctance to
hammer them out is simply because some of them *are* such low-hanging
fruit, and therefore represent a very convenient gateway to attract
contributions. Obviously the ideal from our point of view is that lots of
these things are taken care of by community members, allowing us to keep
our attention on larger, longer term projects.

So the motivation for changing the docs format, and (speaking for myself
here) part of the motivation for not fixing every little docs bug, is
encouraging people to contribute to LiveCode. Much has been made in the
past of the parts of LiveCode that were not available to contribute to. The
effort to rectify that is still ongoing (2015 merged IDE PRs with keyword
'scriptify'
https://github.com/livecode/livecode-ide/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+scriptify+is%3Amerged).
Despite this, we have had very few contributions over all. Now I'm not
blaming anyone for this, it's a difficulty faced by anything 'going open
source', as it requires a culture shift both in the user base and the
staff.

> I'm referring to the documentation stack.

Mike, could you please clarify what you mean by submissions to the
documentation stack being ignored?


On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 10:33 PM Ali Lloyd <ali.lloyd at livecode.com> wrote:

> "submissions to the documentation"
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:34 PM Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net>
> wrote:
>
>> On 01/18/2016 11:29 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> > Mike Kerner wrote:
>> >  > Given how submissions to the documentation, previously, seemed to be
>> >  > ignored, it will be a welcome change.
>> >
>> > If you would please provide URLs for the documentation-related bug
>> > reports and/or pull requests you've submitted I'll review them to see if
>> > if I can determine why they weren't acted on sooner.
>> >
>>
>> How about this one?
>>
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8101
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=162
>>
>> or this one?
>>
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9628
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10798
>>
>> Or
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2961
>>
>> Or (Re-assigning to engine team for future re-assignment.)
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=799
>>
>> <sigh>
>> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1844
>>
>> --
>>   Mark Wieder
>>   ahsoftware at gmail.com
>>
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>