Morning all; now that we have a wiki to ourselves I would like to
organize a bit (and move out of date documentation out of the way). In
the last week I have watched a team waste hours and hours lost on the
wiki - asking people to go to the IRC channel for help simply is *not*
going to happen. Our docs have a simple story to tell and we are
tripping up 
First of all the story:
- checkout and run (using maven)
- run and debug (in eclipse)
- build a community module (making the point that you can contribute
your own work)
I am pleased to report that our docs are doing okay here; if the user
can find the http://geoserver.org/display/GEOSDOC/Developers+Guide they
can get to work.
But what they actually do is type "Hello world geoserver" into google
and end up here...
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/1+Hello+World+Service
Which is part of some out of date OWS4 documentation (linking to the new
site):
- http://geoserver.org/display/GEOSDOC/4+Modules
So I would like to see a couple of things happen:
1) make a wiki space for each target audience (something I have done to
for the udig confluence site and it helps: a) clear writing guidelines
for the space b) you can export the space and have a document to follow)
2) remove ideas that did not work
(http://geoserver.org/display/GEOSDEV/Home) is not used; we now do GSIP
and we have not had anyone graduate a community module so the the need
to write up documentation for "Acceptance" has not hit us yet.
3) move out of date "traps" like those above out of the way; or kill them
Cater to new developers; or we won't have any And SoC provides a
perfect time to work on these docs.
Jody
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Quick update; the "simple" example only works if the geoserver community has been deployed; currently that is not part of the release process (making these instructions useless).
Ideas:
- make a formal "framework" pom.xml for community modules (and others to) use as their parent pom.xml
- include community in the build; and make the -Pcommunity profile just control if the community plug-ins are build (probably the original intention of the profile?)
Cheers,
Jody
Jody Garnett ha scritto:
Quick update; the "simple" example only works if the geoserver community has been deployed; currently that is not part of the release process (making these instructions useless).
This sounds like an exaggeration. If they were really useless we wouldn't have been able to release geoserver. Do you believe that
developers know how to make releases by heart?
Ideas:
- make a formal "framework" pom.xml for community modules (and others to) use as their parent pom.xml
Not sure what you mean here.
- include community in the build; and make the -Pcommunity profile just control if the community plug-ins are build (probably the original intention of the profile?)
Hmmm... that pom is about to gain some profiles already when I'm done
with the csv module (java5 profile), this would probably make it a mess?
Cheers
Andrea
Andrea Aime ha scritto:
Jody Garnett ha scritto:
Quick update; the "simple" example only works if the geoserver community has been deployed; currently that is not part of the release process (making these instructions useless).
This sounds like an exaggeration. If they were really useless we wouldn't have been able to release geoserver. Do you believe that
developers know how to make releases by heart?
In any case you're right in saying that the document needs some love...
it's just that usually we're in a hurry, releases are always late,
unexpected issues pop up, and in the end we do not update the
docs.
As for the hello stuff... there is no consistent effort to make
GeoServer an API, a framework that you can build upon, the core
attention is about making it a good application.
And this unfortunately shows up, among the other factors, in lack
of documentation.
Cheers
Andrea
Andrea Aime wrote:
Jody Garnett ha scritto:
Quick update; the "simple" example only works if the geoserver community has been deployed; currently that is not part of the release process (making these instructions useless).
This sounds like an exaggeration. If they were really useless we wouldn't have been able to release geoserver. Do you believe that developers know how to make releases by heart?
Sorry andrea? Not sure I understand ... the instructions on making a simple application did not work as provided because an artifact (community pom.xml) was not deployed.
Ideas:
- make a formal "framework" pom.xml for community modules (and others to) use as their parent pom.xml
Not sure what you mean here.
don't use community pom.xml; make a separate module (called geoserver/framework) that community modules can use as their parent pom.xml.
- include community in the build; and make the -Pcommunity profile just control if the community plug-ins are build (probably the original intention of the profile?)
Hmmm... that pom is about to gain some profiles already when I'm done with the csv module (java5 profile), this would probably make it a mess?
Then perhaps we should consider a different name for a profile controlling the various community modules -Ppending or -Pexperiments or something?
Jody
Andrea Aime wrote:
In any case you're right in saying that the document needs some love...
it's just that usually we're in a hurry, releases are always late,
unexpected issues pop up, and in the end we do not update the
docs.
As for the hello stuff... there is no consistent effort to make
GeoServer an API, a framework that you can build upon, the core
attention is about making it a good application.
And this unfortunately shows up, among the other factors, in lack
of documentation.
Understood Andrea; the priorities are clear .. the best we can do if fix documentation and procedure as the problems are discovered. I was just fortunate to watch first hand as our documentation confused others.
Jody
Jody Garnett ha scritto:
Andrea Aime wrote:
Jody Garnett ha scritto:
Quick update; the "simple" example only works if the geoserver community has been deployed; currently that is not part of the release process (making these instructions useless).
This sounds like an exaggeration. If they were really useless we wouldn't have been able to release geoserver. Do you believe that developers know how to make releases by heart?
Sorry andrea? Not sure I understand ... the instructions on making a simple application did not work as provided because an artifact (community pom.xml) was not deployed.
Deh, sorry, I read that too fast and understood "the release instructions are useless" instead of the documentation about
the simple example.
Cheers
Andrea