Hey all,
I cleaned up the GEOSDEV space a bit. But as I finished cleaning it up, I wanted to talk a bit about what we all think that this space is actually *for*.
My idea was that the GEOSDEV space would function a bit like the http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Develop space. That is, it's a place for ongoing documentation, support, future planning and collaboration around the ACTIVE development of geoserver.
There's a page for each branch/version, and changes, updates and plans for that branch/version could go on that page. Like the geotools pages for 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x, etc. It's like a much more detailed and active version of the Geoserver "Roadmap" that also lives in the GEOSDEV space.
I see the policy about what each space is for sort-of like this:
GEOS -- The main geoserver site. Place for downloads, blog, user or community-centric news, etc. A 'community space' as it were, where GSIPs (and other things like them) get hashed out by both developers *and* the community. GEOSDEV could probably live quite happily at GEOS/Develop (like in geotools). But hey, we've got the extra space, so why not use it.
GEOSDOC -- The hardcore documentation space. The official user-manual and official developer guides live here. The big question I had about the GEOSDOC space is "Which *VERSION* of geoserver does this documentation refer to?" And "which branch do these development practices apply to?"
I think the answer has to be "GEOSDOC is about *standard* development practices, and the User manual there is about the CURRENT geoserver release." I suppose this means that documentation that is out of date or no longer relevant to a current version should get deleted from GEOSDOC. What about previous version support though? That's a tough one, but I suppose we could just export the site as a part of each major version release.
Note that corollary of the previous paragraph is that there shouldn't be any version numbers in the Users Guide part of GeoServer. And for the developers guide part, those bits that are specific to a particular version should clearly state so.
GEOSDEV -- I see this as the place where the developers have their wiki space. To expose new ideas, plans, diagrams and stuff. Things that aren't GSIPs, and that don't fit cleanly into GEOSDOC (hey, they may never make it to anything at all anyway!) but that aren't exactly community-focused discussion either.
What do other people think about this? As I said, Geotools does this with just two spaces--GEOT, which has community and a special (big!) section for developers and GEOTDOC, which is the user manual. Whatever we decide, I think there's a need for all three sections, and wherever the right place is for each one, we should prominently note this.
--saul
