[TYPO3-doc] Encouraging people to contribute with Github

[Fabien Udriot]

> That's also why I'd
> appreciate to see some externally developed, useful tools from the
> community be integrated on TYPO3-infrastructure.

Believe me, that will not happen! I am long enough in the documentation team to tell we don't have
the resources to achieve this.

Current situation (in the last 6 months) is that we had very little - if no contribution - related
to documentation expect from the documentation team members which can be counted on the fingers of
one hand. And look at the documentation we have... so many parts are out dated.

Do we want to keep the current situation?

Contributions are difficult to get in general in open-source project particularly in things that
sound less exciting like writing documentation. On the top of that we must admit new contributors
have a technical barrier to overcome. Our workflow, based on Gerrit, implies many manipulations that
is putting off new people.

Although Github will not bring any guarantee we will get tons of contributions, it will
significantly increase our chances. Think of that! In two clicks you can submit a documentation
change without leaving your browser (see my the first post for more details).

I have no problem considering Github as a transitory solution waiting the tools getting better on
the market. I also have this kind of solution on my radar:
http://en.highscore.de/cpp/boost/smartpointers.html but again it is much more work to handle the
"backend". I can dedicate a 2-3 days work on that, not more.

All the best,

Fabien

On 2/24/13 12:40 PM, Stefan Neufeind wrote:
> On 02/23/2013 06:30 AM, Michael Schams wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> The benefits are tempting and other open source projects switched to
>> GitHub, too - but keep in mind, this would be a step of the TYPO3
>> project to depend on a company and their directions/decisions. I know,
>> that this topic has been discussed in other areas, e.g. the typo3-dev
>> and typo3-ect mailing lists as far as I can remember.
>>
>> Do not get me wrong: I am not totally against the GitHub idea but I
>> hesitate to be excited about it and I am looking forward reading your
>> comments and opinions about my concerns - maybe I am totally wrong :-)
> 
> I also have a problem with relying on GitHub or any shiny tools not
> really open and/or not on TYPO3-infrastructure. That's also why I'd
> appreciate to see some externally developed, useful tools from the
> community be integrated on TYPO3-infrastructure.
> 
> Imho GitHub could be one "frontend" for people to use to create their
> patches and submit them back to the TYPO3-systems - just as if they'd be
> using a git-client locally to push a change. But apart from that I don't
> see any code-reviews, editing or bugtracking being done with
> GitHub-services.
> 
> 
> I remember back to the time before git and before our current
> code-review-system in place. And I feel that introducing gerrit,
> interacting with forge etc. has brought us a huge step forward. Also in
> terms of openness (basically everybody can contribute to reviews).
> 
> 
> When people often mention that it needs to become easier to contribute
> and that GitHub has shiny web-based tools for that (especially for the
> docs-team) I agree. But things like webbased editors (and be it Wikis or
> things like Etherpads) are not rocket-science. And if we see such needs
> I'm sure we can integrate webbased editors for easy editing and pushing
> to gerrit - either integrated with gerrit (maybe contributing some code
> to them) or through some API to gerrit.
> 
> 
> To sum it up: I'd like to propose not just to see GitHub or similar have
> "so much cool stuff" but to take a step back and make a list of things
> we'd actually need to work better (webbased patch-editor, ...). Then we
> can see how we can implement that - without loosing good things from the
> current infrastructure and workflows of the TYPO3-community.
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
>  Stefan
>