[TYPO3-doc] thanks to the doc team!!!

[François Suter]

Hi Stefano,

> i have updated all the core manuals with latest (many) new versions
>
> i just wanted to thank you to the doc team!
> how good and updated manuals are important to develop well and feel
> comfortable with TYPO3!

Thanks a lot for your encouragements. Words of gratitude help us plowing 
on :-)

> i wish the Association would give much more resources to the docs area

This is not a simple issue. First of all you don't get money out of the 
blue, you have to make a budget request to the Association, which is 
fair enough IMO. And actually for the first time the Documentation Team 
has some budget this year, because I made 2 requests last year, which 
were granted.

There's a small budget strictly for official documentation maintenance 
and a larger budget for migration to reStructured Text (originally 
migration to DocBook). I see the budget for documentation maintenance 
more as a sign of gratitude for a tedious job that needs to be done. For 
the reST migration the budget is rather meant to pay for someone's work 
when we come to areas that will need more effort.

Having a budget is only part of the problem and I must say that it was 
easy getting one. I had no trouble justifying the budget requests and 
they were granted by the Association without further questions (I guess 
my requests were very reasonable). The next issue is finding people. 
Just from a personal point of view, budget doesn't help as I mostly lack 
time. But it is possible to find people.

There remains the problem of actually having money to distribute. In the 
case of the 2 budgets available this year, their aims are quite well 
defined, so deciding who should benefit from them (based on work done) 
is not very difficult. However the sudden "intrusion" of money in a team 
where there was never any before now does cause some disruption and some 
people were not happy about it. I also feel that having a budget makes 
more sense when you have a clear project (like the migration to reST) 
rather than the general maintenance.

All in all it's not simple and that's why I didn't apply again for 
budgets for 2012. So if the Doc Team doesn't have budgets next year it's 
actually entirely my fault. And what I regret - retrospectively - is to 
have taken this decision alone rather than debating it here in the 
mailing list. The fact that the reminder for budget requests came quite 
late (as usual) and I should have planned it in advance. Now I made 
myself a note for next year to get and early start and discuss the point 
of having budget in this list.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch