fixing what we can

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 14:47 +1000, Christopher Curran wrote:

>  I have to agree, fedora docs project is by far the hardest project
> I've 
>  ever tried to join. Previous development projects all I had to do is 
>  send an email and hey presto SVN write access. This whole process is so 
>  long and drawn out it is probably marginalising a whole swathe of 
>  potential contributers. 
It is certain there are people who fall to the wayside with this
process.  The inevitability of that is a separate, semi-philosophical
discussion.

When you say "the fedora docs project", do you mean this sub-project
itself?  Or "the Fedora Project" in general?

Most of the challenges we've discussed so far are all about the overall
project joining process and not specific to Fedora Docs.

We can do best by improving what we have in our purview.  What have we
discovered in the recent threads that we can directly fix from Fedora
Docs or our positions elsewhere in Fedora?

The second iteration of the Fedora account system (FAS2) is close to
release.  It resolves a lot of the historical problems of the old
system.  It does not, however, remove the requirement to agree to the
CLA.  However, the need to GPG sign the CLA may be required only for
people who work on code and content that goes into a release.  Since
code and content from places such as bugzilla and the wiki can be
filtered through people who have GPG-signed the CLA, a click-through can
suffice where needed (the wiki, not bugzilla.)

As Fedora has grown, we have a strange irony.  Work we did in the past
to resolve single-point problems ("Need wiki, must be Python?  Moin Moin
it is) have come to bite us as we are growing because they don't scale
the way we need to.  However, now that we have grown, it is harder to
replace semi-broken stuff we have relied upon ("Migrate from the wiki?
But we have 10,000 pages, DocBook XML dependencies, and on and on ...")

Rooting these cases out and making them flexible, scalable, and best fit
is a challenge that the Fedora Infrastructure and (now) Websites teams
are doing a great job with over the last (almost) year.  I'm *very*
encouraged about our future here.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41

[Jared Smith]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 15:09 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
>  We can do best by improving what we have in our purview.  What have
> we
>  discovered in the recent threads that we can directly fix from Fedora
>  Docs or our positions elsewhere in Fedora? 
So in the interests of making this process easier for new contributors,
I cornered Paul at our local LUG meeting this morning and we looked at
the GPG key instructions with fresh eyes.  We've gone through the
instructions at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/UsingGpg/CreatingKeys and
organized it, cleaned it up, and added a bunch of additional
documentation in places where it was sorely lacking.

If there are people out there that are struggling with the process of
setting up their GPG key pair, I'd encourage them to take a look at the
shiny new changes.

-Jared

[Karl Larsen]

Jared Smith wrote:
>  On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 15:09 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
>    
> > We can do best by improving what we have in our purview.  What have we
> > discovered in the recent threads that we can directly fix from Fedora
> > Docs or our positions elsewhere in Fedora?
> >     
>
>  So in the interests of making this process easier for new contributors,
>  I cornered Paul at our local LUG meeting this morning and we looked at
>  the GPG key instructions with fresh eyes.  We've gone through the
>  instructions at
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/UsingGpg/CreatingKeys and
>  organized it, cleaned it up, and added a bunch of additional
>  documentation in places where it was sorely lacking.
>
>  If there are people out there that are struggling with the process of
>  setting up their GPG key pair, I'd encourage them to take a look at the
>  shiny new changes.
>
>  -Jared
>
>     
    I looked and it is the same stuff but much better organization. I 
have been reading Help Seahorse and they talk about sub-keys as being 
the way to do things. But the help is not real clear there.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
   PGP 7025 BB6C 7CC3 CFE7 43B2  1574 3279 EBB0 B626 2B7E

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 11:29 -0700, Karl Larsen wrote:
>  Jared Smith wrote:
>  > So in the interests of making this process easier for new contributors,
>  > I cornered Paul at our local LUG meeting this morning and we looked at
>  > the GPG key instructions with fresh eyes.  We've gone through the
>  > instructions at
>  > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/UsingGpg/CreatingKeys and
>  > organized it, cleaned it up, and added a bunch of additional
>  > documentation in places where it was sorely lacking.
>  >
>  > If there are people out there that are struggling with the process of
>  > setting up their GPG key pair, I'd encourage them to take a look at the
>  > shiny new changes.
>  >
>  > -Jared
>  >
>  >   
>      I looked and it is the same stuff but much better organization. I 
>  have been reading Help Seahorse and they talk about sub-keys as being 
>  the way to do things. But the help is not real clear there. 
We are still working on it; please be patient, and remember that we are
all volunteers doing this in our spare time. :-)  Jared and I are
testing this as we go to make sure the instructions get as clear as
possible.

I noticed a lot of the material and organization has "drifted" since I
first wrote this page, making the steps very cluttered.  Jared and I are
making a concerted effort to make the workflow clickable using anchors
and clear procedural links.  Once we're finished, I think this would be
worthwhile for us to consider when revising other procedural guides.  We
are organizing this in much the way John Babich and others are talking
about organizing the DUG, where each section branches for GNOME, KDE,
and CLI.  A link at the bottom of each section directs the user within
the same branch, or for single-branch sections, includes a link for each
following branch, like this:

(This is ASCII art, so you will need to be using a fixed-width font to
view it correctly.

         -- GNOME Step 1 --                      -- GNOME Step 3
Intro --+-- KDE Step 1   --+-- Unified Step 2 --+-- KDE Step 3    ...
         -- CLI Step 1   --                      -- CLI Step 3

There should be at the end of Intro links to all three Step 1 branches.
Each Step 1 branch has a link to Step 2.  Step 2 has links to all Step 3
branches, and so forth.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug