discuss: Dealing with poor maintenance by maintainers
Subject:
Re: Dealing with poor maintenance by maintainers
From:
Randy Kramer ####@####.####
Date:
12 May 2002 18:01:06 -0000
Message-Id: <3CDEABA7.166B@fast.net>
David Lawyer wrote:
> Unfortunately many of our HOWTOs (and other docs) are poorly maintained.
> It's something we need to deal with and find a new maintainer if the
> existing one doesn't have time to adequately do it. There are a couple of
> different aspects to maintaining a doc.
----<snip>-----
> So what do we do about this? For one, we can establish a different
> organization of docs that need work, rather than just "unmaintained". I
> tentatively suggest:
>
> 1. Unmaintained
> 2. New-Maintainer-Needed
> 3. Co-Maintainer-Needed
> 4. Obsolete
Interesting idea, and maybe part of what is needed, but I wonder if it
really focuses on one of the issues you brought up (and I snipped before
I realized my response would refer to it) -- that of the document not
keeping up with changes.
I don't really know how to address that, but *maybe* we should encourage
another class of help -- people that stay up with the leading (but
hopefully not bleeding) edge of specific topics and advise the
maintainer when some new development requires that a HOWTO be revised.
These could be people who have no interest in writing (it might be nicer
if they did want to help with the writing) but who kept up with the
subject matter in a specific area for their own reasons, and were
willing to provide feedback on one or a few HOWTOs.
(I don't think it would be much use to have a "dilletante" (sp?) who
simply reported on rumored or whatever changes in a vast quantity of
fields, but, instead, someone who could make reasonable judgements about
when a "gleam in the eye" becomes a working feature, and that it is now
appropriate that it be addressed in the HOWTO.)
The advantage to the author / maintainer of a HOWTO would be that he has
a little less noise to sort through, in terms of people telling him this
or that new change that is coming along and needs to be addressed.
(Those people might still send those messages, but the maintainer could
be fairly confident that he could safely ignore them (not even read
them) until the volunteer I describe said that it was appropriate to
modify the document.)
Of course, I would think that, in most cases, the author of a HOWTO
would almost as a matter of course stay up-to-date on a topic he cared
enough about to write a HOWTO. On the other hand, some of the stuff I
put on WikiLearn or my home TWiki is only to remind me (or someone else)
how I accomplished a specific task so that if I have to do it again, I
have a minimum of relearning to do -- I am not interested in keeping up
with day to day developments in the tools that I might have used for
that specifit task.
Just a thought.
Randy Kramer
