ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Kevin Godby <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Patrick.

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Patrick Dickey <pdickeybeta@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Was anyone from the Ubuntu Documentation team in the summit meeting?

Unless they were watching in the IRC channel, I'm not aware of any
docs team members who attended.

> My three questions were aimed at the Documentation team, as I think that
> we could adopt some of their methods to reduce the lag time between when
> a version of Ubuntu is released and when our manual is released.
>
> If nothing else, once the feature freeze is in effect, we could start
> writing our chapters (and only have to modify them as we get closer to
> the release date--if something changes). Then we could do the
> screenshots on the last beta/release candidate (or on the actual
> release) and have the manual out within weeks--as opposed to months.

I think the primary setback for the Natty manual (which became the
Oneiric manual) was all the rewrites that needed to be done to
incorporate the new Unity interface.  I suspect that publishing
Precise will take much less time. I allowed for a bit more time during
the authoring period (about a month) so we could get ourselves
organized again.

Going forward, I think we should be more proactive in monitoring the
changes made to Ubuntu so we know what will need to be rewritten in
the manual.  I also think that having regular meetings and maintaining
contact with our team members will help keep everyone involved.

We could do most of the writing prior to the UI freeze for Quantal and
quickly take the screenshots after the UI freeze.

--Kevin