discuss: Proposed new document status designations
Subject:
Re: Proposed new document status designations
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
21 May 2002 06:02:46 -0000
Message-Id: <20020520180307.A555@lafn.org>
On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 04:46:00PM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> > On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 09:16:12PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> > > To promote better quality documentation, it's important that the LDP
> > > provide lists of docs where the maintainer (usually the author) wants
> > > out or wants help in maintaining his/her doc. At the same time there
> > > are some other types of lists that are needed: a list of documents that
> > > authors started to write but never finished and a list of docs that are
> > > abandoned but which we can't modify due to the license.
> >
> On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 08:50:11PM +0200, Guylhem P Aznar wrote:
> > Sounds good. Could it be implemented into lampadas as an additional
> > parameter?
You mean parameters. There are 8 new status parameters I've proposed.
The current statuses "unmaintained", "replaced", and likely some others
become defunct. Here's the outline again. The 8 new statuses are
numbered below with Arabic numerals.
I. MAINTAINER WANTED
1. abandoned (but allows modification)
2. author wants out (still maintained but maintainer wants out)
3. want co-maintainer
II. AUTHOR WANTED
1. wish-list
2. frozen (license prohibits modification)
3. unfinished (was once in-progress)
4. rejected (needs rewrite)
III. OBSOLETE
1. obsolete (only one entry)
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> Asking for additional maintainers, yes. I will put it on the proposed
> feature list and we'll do it when we can, or when a coder writes the
> code, basically.
>
> Docs started but not finished are given the status "Pending" in
> Lampadas, so that feature is already there.
No it's not. Your "Pending" seems to mean "In-Progress" meaning that
progress is being made in writing the document. When progress ceases it
becomes "unfinished" and new authors may take it over.
> You could run a report of Pending documents, sorted by their creation
> date, to see what docs seem to be dead.
These would be "unfinished". They are different from being unmaintained
as they need an author to finish them, not a maintainer.
> Docs that are abandoned are marked "unmaintained", and each document
> has a license assigned, so you can also pull that list already.
Per my proposal, "unmaintained" is split into "abandoned", "obsolete",
and "frozen". These distinctions are important. We would consider the
maintenance of an "obsolete" document a very low priority. So we wouldn't
normally direct people (who want to help us) to that list. The frozen list
is important so as to demonstrate the problems which can resulting from a
semi-free license. It means that the new author has to start over.
PS: In the db I found only 7 pending. But checking the "In-Progress" in
the /authors tree on LDP's website (there's a link from the homepage)
showed 63 documents! Why such a big difference?
David Lawyer
