discuss: Proposed new document status designations
Subject:
Re: Proposed new document status designations
From:
David Merrill ####@####.####
Date:
21 May 2002 14:37:27 -0000
Message-Id: <20020521152941.GF6701@lupercalia.net>
On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 06:03:08PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> 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)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > 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.
Yes, but the "maintained" field tells you whether it is maintained.
So a doc whose pub_status is 'pending' and whose maintained status is
'unmaintained' is one that was started, then abandoned.
> > 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.
"frozen" in your proposal is the same as 'license' = non-free in my
system. All the same information you want is already there, just in a
different form.
> 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?
Only that I do not maintain the pending list in the database. Nobody
is actually using it, anyway. Anyone is welcome to help maintain the
data in the db, but I cannot do it and also develop the code.
--
David C. Merrill http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project ####@####.####
Lead Developer http://www.tldp.org
Maureen Johnson, back from her spectacular one-night engagement
at the eleventh street lot, will sing native american tribal
chants backwards through her vocoder, while accompanying herself
on the electric cello - which she has never studied.
-- RENT
