discuss: Thread: howto archive authors answers

hello,

We will soon begin the work on the HOWTOs.

We have to ask any author if he wants to continue to be so, and if the
licence don't allow modification, ask him if he want to change this
(or not).

Mhydra, could you share the letter you already sent?

But finally, how can we *archive" the author answer (we can't only
trust any people saying so? may we?)

probably a copy of the author's mail here, on discuss, should be enough?

thanks
jdd
-- 
jdd for the Linux Documentation Project
http://wiki.tldp.org
http://www.dodin.net

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:16:28AM +0100, jdd for http://tldp.org wrote:
> hello,
> 
> We will soon begin the work on the HOWTOs.
> 
> We have to ask any author if he wants to continue to be so, and if the
> licence don't allow modification, ask him if he want to change this
> (or not).
> 
> Mhydra, could you share the letter you already sent?
> 
> But finally, how can we *archive" the author answer (we can't only
> trust any people saying so? may we?)
> 
> probably a copy of the author's mail here, on discuss, should be enough?

You're not going to burden this list with all this noise on this
mailing list?  One thing we need a some kind of a database.  One could
create a simple one with one file of metadata for each howto and write
scripts to extract data from the source of each howto.  These files
need to have a standard format so that later on the data can be
extracted by a script to put into a better database.  I would use a
linuxdoc-like sgml format.  Or it could be xml.
<author-2008-response> would be for the author's email.  Is there any
need for nested tags?  

I again point out that many authors would like to maintain their
HOWTOs, if they have time.  And they are likely to be in a situation
where they don't really know for sure if they will have time to do it.
So you can't really ask them if they want to maintain it.  So it is a
probabilistic situation.  Some may think it's say 90% likely that they
will be able to maintain it over the next few years, but with a
smaller percentage if you were to ask "over the next 10 years".
Others may think it's only 10% likely that they will find time to
maintain it.  And their assessment of probabilities may be wrong.  Due
to problems in the economy, they might need to retire early and then
have much more time than they thought.  Or they might need to take a
job that required more hours of work and thus have almost no time for
LDP.  Or they might get involved in something else they consider more
important (as I did).  So you might ask them to supply a probability
estimation for: various lengths of time: the next year, the next 3, 5,
and 10 years.  Perhaps just the next 1 and 3 years would be OK.  If
the probability is low for the next 3 years, we and/or the-author
needs to look for a new maintainer.

Also, years ago, I suggested a database that would allow authors to
ask for a new maintainer.  One answer to the question of whether an
author can maintain the doc is that they would rather not maintain it,
but are willing to do so for a while if no new maintainer can be
found.  The plone CMS by David Merrill was going to have this feature
but it was never completed and no one took over the project.

			David Lawyer

David Lawyer a écrit :

>> probably a copy of the author's mail here, on discuss, should be enough?
> 
> You're not going to burden this list with all this noise on this
> mailing list?  One thing we need a some kind of a database.

mailing list is a kind of database :-), and we can very easily create
a mailinst list just for this purpose (no real need to be subscribed,
archives do the job)

  One could
> create

we just have to find the "one". You may be aware that we are unlikely
to have any complain, the archiving is just a precaution

> I again point out that many authors would like to maintain their
> HOWTOs, if they have time.

we don't ask for any length of time :-). Use of the wiki may lower
considerably the burden of maintaining. If I judge on my own
situation, I used docbook/linuxdoc only for the HOWTO, never for
anything else, so each time I wanted to change a comma, I had to learn
again the langage, find again the tools an send a submit. So I did
this nearly never.

on the contrary, with the wiki, even if the user don't make the
change, the author have just to connect, fix and save. and most people
nowaday have to use a wiki or an other and know how.

jdd


-- 
jdd for the Linux Documentation Project
http://wiki.tldp.org
http://www.dodin.net