Documentation Questions

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 6:56 AM, Tax Assistance Program - ( taptax )
<taptax at nd.edu> wrote:
> 2.  How is the documentation process managed?  I picture some sort of draft, review, and finalization process (whether simple or composed of many stages).  How does one enter this effort and what mechanisms need to be used?
>

I'm going out on a limb here because I am not an "official" member of
anything, However I have been using GnuCash (mostly) very happily and
successfully for several years. Plus I have filed several bug reports
and have responded to several messages on the lists, so maybe that
makes me a part of the "team". (Think of me as a weak link if you
like.) ;-)

My observation is that ALL one has to do to be a part of GnuCash is to
contribute. That includes documentation. If you can learn to produce
documentation in a way that integrates properly and easily into the
existing structure (or I presume, do all the work required to create a
new structure) then the existing folks are much more likely to accept
your changes and updates quickly.

I do say all this (again) as an active user, but also as a person with
years of experience writing software documentation BUT too busy with
the "business" tasks to contribute much to GnuCash at the moment. You
would think that I of all people would be horrified at the substandard
documentation, but believe me, there are plenty of paid commercial
products having worse.


> 3.  Since the actual development of the product has exceeded the pace of the documentation, where do I find a list of features not documented and a brief statement of the purpose of these features?  There must be some sort of notes that established an agreed goal that the programmers used to guide their work.
>

I believe you will find most of what you are looking for as links from
wiki.gnucash.org -- the design documents are in svn, though I should
let others comment on the up-to-date and "agreed goal" parts.