Re: Some notes on the Wiki (was: 4.1 news item)

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>]

> It appears to me that you're relating unrelated effects and causes.

Not really.
People don't contribute to the current docs for the following main
reasons, AFAICT and have heard from people, *in order of number of
complaints i've heard from people*:

1. They don't want to send continual incomplete patches, they'd rather
update it in small bites on their own time schedule, without getting
nitpicked to death as often happens on doc patches (hence the reason you
see stuff done on wiki, where this is easily possible)

2. The current docs don't cover what they want to talk about.

3. They don't like texinfo, they don't want to edit it.

These are all related causes of the effect that our documentation and
the process behind it hasn't worked for as long as i've been hacking gcc
(5 or 6 years now).  Everyone seems to pretend "oh, it's just the damn
lazy developers fault, they don't update docs".  Have you ever
considered there may be reasons for this, other than lazy developers,
like the above?

I'm not sure why we, as someone else put it, ignore the implicit
feedback from developers about our docs, and the process, and just try
to force everyone to do what we want, when they just end up not doing it
or doing the bare minimum as a result. 

I'm not saying a complete free for all is the best process here, but
it's pretty clear at least to me that what we do now in terms of
developer docs, and how we do it, plain old doesn't work well. So maybe
it's time to try something else, and work *with* people who want to be
writing docs, instead of just trying to hammer people into following the
current process?

--Dan