RFC: The end of the contributors article

[Tom Rhodes]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:31:39 +0100
Joel Dahl <joel at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Fre 2007-01-12 klockan 20:11 +0900 skrev Hiroki Sato:
> > Joel Dahl <joel at freebsd.org> wrote
> >   in <1168562996.1100.42.camel at jesus.automatvapen.se>:
> > 
> > jo> Today I decided to finally do what I've been planning to do for a long
> > jo> time: move stuff out of the contributors article and instead place it
> > jo> under www/.
> > jo>
> > jo> I started with the teams etc and you can see the results here (nowhere
> > jo> near finished yet though):
> > jo>
> > jo> http://people.freebsd.org/~joel/wii/team.html
> > jo>
> > jo> So, why bother anyway?  Well:
> > jo>
> > jo> -  Better information about what the different teams do and what their
> > jo>    responsibilities are.  Our developers are generally very confused
> > jo>    when it comes to finding the right person to talk to, for example
> > jo>    when requesting repo-copies or new perforce accounts etc.  This will
> > jo>    hopefully improve the situation somewhat.
> > jo> -  The translation teams generally don't translate the contributors
> > jo>    article since it doesn't seem to be worth the effort.  Hopefully
> > jo>    this will change now, since this can be quite important information
> > jo>    even for non-English speaking people.
> > jo> -  Email addresses are not completely visible anymore.
> > jo> -  This information does not really belong in an article.
> > jo> -  This is more up-to-date and includes a lot more teams etc.
> > 
> >  It is good to make the contributors list up-to-date, but what is the
> >  benefit to move it to the www tree?  And where is the source file?
> 
> You'll get to see the source when I have something to show you.
> 
> >  I think issue we have for the list is that this sort of information
> >  is scattered in the doc/www tree and the scattered information is
> >  difficult to maintain (remember a case of the mirror site list).  So
> >  I think the direction we should go is to have a directory for the
> >  developers, build a structure to pick up necessary information from
> >  it, and leave the maintenance to each developer (like pgpkey).
> >  Maintaining such a directory in an HTML page is not a good idea---if
> >  we have active maintainers of the list it will work, but it will not
> >  last long unfortunately.  Since I could not find the source file of
> >  your proposed team.html I am not sure how this page was generated,
> >  but if it was done by hand let's take account of the maintenance
> >  issue first.
> 
> I've been maintaining the contributors article for almost 1,5 year now,
> in case you haven't noticed.  This won't change anytime soon.

A long time ago, I tried a similar cleanup, which is why we have
our current setup today.  Originally we had two more documents
covering this information, and I tried to fill up the article,
but fell short.  I can't remember why, I think someone whined
to me and I told them to do it themselves.  Or perhaps I just
got busy with something else.  Can't remember.  Regardless,
I'm glad to see someone picking up where I had left off.  Thanks
Joel.

-- 
Tom Rhodes