KDE HIG, CIG and AG

[Aaron Seigo]

On Wednesday 25 August 2004 16:18, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Is access control really needed? Where is the trust among the KDE
> community? 

first off, i don't see ACLs needed as much as a process that we all just 
respect. if people go committing bodies of new content as a way to end-run 
the processes, then we may need ACLs. otherwise i don't see the need for 
ACLs. we simply need to coordinate and create consensus before adding to the 
guidelines; these are documents with tremendous ramifications for the 
project.

so control is needed. it isn't as much a matter of trust as it is of 
logistics. guidelines are more like documentation than code, and we know what 
we have learned from that: you need to be careful for reasons of consistency, 
translation and cvs conflicts to coordinate changes to the repository 
carefully.

these are also guidelines that will last for years and must reflect the needs 
of usability, accessability and community identity. this really requires a 
process that isn't "cats herding themselves" as we do (very effectively) when 
writing code.

to be honest, this is probably one of the more trivial points within the 
proposal. we have everyone here who actually contributed to the old 
styleguide, as well as all the people who will be authoring the new AG and 
CIG. so we have very good representation at aKademy, and we covered a lot 
more interesting and exciting events during the BOF like actually having the 
(wo)man-power to write these guidelines available to us! =)

> Doesn't it work in all other cvs modules (except www, for 
> whatever reason) 

www has them because it's both public and paragraph-based documentation.

> Are guideline writers more special than code writers?

it's not about the writers being special. it's about the content having 
different requirements.

> What about missspelled words or syntax errors? Should we really wait until
> the maintainer had the time to review the little fix?

please send a patch to the mailing list first. given the paragraph based 
nature of guidelines, such fixes must be coordinated with the maintainers 
even more so than they are in code due to the merging nightmares this can 
create (and has created in the past in documentation). having a spelling 
error in the file for a few days won't have any practical negative effects, 
really.

> Please, give a reasoning for this.

does this make it any clearer for you, or are there remaining questions that 
linger for you?

-- 
Aaron Seigo, currently in Ludwigsburg
KDE World Conference 2004: aKademy