Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> I'm sorry, but content in HACKING should be easily found - and when
> you intentionally hide it like we are doing, I think it hurts the
> community. I find the "Getting Involved" page - as written - to be
> completely useless compared to what is in HACKING.
>
> I really dislike how we keep punting around one of the community's
> most important files simply because...
>
> So, no, we need to emphasize that content even more - which means it
> needs to be in the NavBar somewhere. I'm open for ideas how to best
> do it, but the previous state of things was simply not acceptable in
> my opinion. -- justin
Justin, we're trying to aim our content at a wide variety of individuals,
from those who've only heard of Subversion to those that use it heavily to
those that are developing it. And yeah, I admit that I've been trying to
give non-dev site visitors preferential treatment. Maybe that's wrong of
me. To that end, "Getting Involved" isn't really aimed at you (and
furthermore, is but a draft at this stage), so I'm not surprised that you
find it useless. It's really aimed at a few million other Subversion users,
fashioned after similar pages found on other high-profile software projects'
websites.
Not sure what makes you think we're trying to "hide" HACKING. It's one hop
away from the frontpage in what should be an obvious location (a page
devoted to documentation -- release docs, api docs, process docs, etc.). In
fact, we link to it in some fashion from easily half of the site's pages.
Is it just that you think changing the document's name was an attempt to
hide it? If so, we can change it back -- that's far too petty a thing to
get fussy about. (Also, not sure why the lack of a nav-bar link to this
document is suddenly a problem for you, either, since we didn't have such a
link at subversion.tigris.org. But whatever.)
I'm totally for making the site easy to use. But I oppose the kind of adhoc
editing that made the previous site so absolutely ridiculous to navigate and
maintain. Consider the ratio of site visitors who routinely think, "Oh, I
need to look that up in the HACKING doc" to those who don't even know what
that doc is (and don't need to). I'm quite sure it's staggeringly small.
And you've just added a link (in all caps, even) to that highly specialized
document to every page of the site at the cost of every visitor's mental
cycles. That's uncool.
If we fleshed out the "Developer Resources" page (currently commented out of
the left-nav), complete with a prominent link to the HACKING document, would
that provide an easy enough path to this information for you?
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
Received on 2010-02-03 16:58:32 CET