GnuCash at Open Help?

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 09 May 2014 18:18:57 Wm Tarr wrote:
> On 07/05/2014 22:56, John Ralls wrote:
> > On May 7, 2014, at 1:14 PM, Ekaterina Gerasimova 
<kittykat3756 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> I'm not sure if you're the right person to talk to about user help
> >> in
> >> GnuCash (documentation, mailing lists and other forms), so I would
> >> appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction if
> >> you're
> >> not the right person.
> >> 
> >> I'm a long term GnuCash user and the current GNOME documentation
> >> team
> >> lead, so I'm somewhat interested in how GnuCash manage their
> >> documentation and user help.
> >> 
> >> For the last few years, the GNOME docs team have been attending
> >> Open
> >> Help[1], and annual conference which is dedicated to documentation
> >> and user help in the open source/Free software world. The
> >> conference usually has many projects attending, such as Wikimedia
> >> and Debian, so makes a really good forum for documentation related
> >> talk and brainstorming.
> >> 
> >> I've managed to wrangle a few free passes for the conference, so I
> >> was wondering if GnuCash would be interested in coming this year?
> >> There are still presentation/panel slots available if you're
> >> interested in talking about the project, and there are normally
> >> hackfest spaces available for a few days after the conference too.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Looking forward to hearing from you
> >> Kat
> >> 
> >> [1] http://openhelpconference.com/
> > 
> > Kat,
> > 
> > Thanks for thinking of us. I'm forwarding this to our developer's
> > list to bring it to the attention of the rest of the team. It's a
> > standard mailman list with a low level of traffic, but I'll
> > understand completely if you choose not to subscribe to carry on
> > the discussion. I'll relay your replies if you like.
> > 
> > I'm not much of a documenter and any not able to attend a conference
> > in mid-June. Perhaps someone else will pipe up.
> > 
> > As for how we handle it, we maintain a separate repository for it;
> > the public mirror is at https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs.
> > We're currently releasing a new set in sync with GnuCash releases
> > even if there are no documentation changes since the previous
> > release. Online and downloadable versions of the released docs are,
> > as you probably know, at http://www.gnucash.org/docs.phtml.
> > 
> > The docs themselves are in DocBook as is standard for Gnome. We've
> > had several instances of potential contributors being scared off
> > because there are no good and Free direct editors and XML is a bit
> > intimidating. We've discussed a few alternatives but haven't been
> > able to agree on any.
> Any progress on this from a thought POV?
> 
There are currently no changes planned in the documentation 
infrastructure.


> I managed to get some of it working and some of it written up but then
> thought ... why bother if no-one else will go through the hoops?
> 
Why bother ? Because users will certainly be grateful for improvements 
in the documentation :)

> The conference is an ocean away from me.
> 
That's the same for me.

Geert