[Asterisk-Users] Re: Why Asterisk documentation is so poor...

[Olle E. Johansson]

Doug Meredith wrote:
> "Olle E. Johansson" <oej at edvina.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Sergey,
>>I am sorry if you took our comments that badly. I proposed a worthing
>>and you did not accept that and refused to update according to our
>>suggestions. Tilghman therefor decided to close the bug.
>>
>>I suggest you try again, re-open the bug, fix the problem and continue
>>to add more documentation. We do need more documentation! It has to be
>>correct though, and that's why we are giving feedback.
> 
> 
> I believe I understand and share Sergey's confusion.  Maybe it is
> something we just don't understand about how Asterisk development
> works.  If he has made a useful contribution with the exception of one
> sentence, why don't you just change that sentence and apply it?  Will
> you only accept suggestions in the form of directly appliable patches?
> 
Well, as Corydon76 said in the bug report - neither he or I can commit
patches. Neither of us are paid by anyone to spend our time fixing other
people's patches or bugs or even giving input... So please don't suppose
that we have time or require us to fix other peoples additions.

And with the pressure on the committers and developers that we have now,
while trying to stabilize 1.2, we do rely on the reporter to try to take
the patch all the way, considering input. It was an easy change to make,
and should not have caused this discussion.

I do not necessarily agree that the bug should have been closed, I would
personally have kept it open until someone bothered with doing the
necessary changes and moved it forward.

We do need more people that are interested in writing docs and fixing
bugs, not just developers that add new features. Very few spend time
fixing other people's patches, testing other people's patches, giving
input and assisting in moving stuff forward. Very few people outside
Digium fix bugs reported in the bug tracker, many more contribute new
code for new functionality.

Feel free to join the larger development group, helping all of us to
move forward. Try to balance being a user that gets something for free
with contributing back :-)

If you want to fix this particular document, just find someone in the
#asterisk-bugs channel on IRC and we'll happily re-open the bug report
for you.

/Olle

...who has had to fix many documentation contributions several times
before they where accepted...