Re: Please help developing Emacs

[Kevin A. Burton]

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Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     Hm.  Why was this restricted to the emacs-devel mailing list?  Kind of 
> like
>     preaching to the converted.
> 
> emacs-devel includes mostly people who already know more than a little about
> Emacs.  If we post on a bigger list, it would include many inexperienced
> people; if they want to help, they could very easily just take up time and not
> provide any help.  Asking them might be worth doing, but we'd have to figure
> out a way to do it that guides people into things that are actually useful.

I understand your concern and I think they could be valid.

But IMO I have seen other projects do this and they have done a great job at
attracting the community.

Both the ASF and KDE projects are good examples.

Both ask for help but make it clear that if you are a user it would be
innappropriate to contribute to a -devel discussion.  In practice it doesn't
happen.

Also.  Documentation that encourages non-developers to contribute documentation
and bug reports would be a good thing to see.

>     Also.  I think we should make the project more approachable, similar to
>     the way gcc.gnu.org handles it.
> 
> What specifically do you have in mind?

They use the same website design that a lot of popular Free Software projects
(Apache, KDE use).

A main introductory page, with an index to the left which includes:

- - user resources

    - screenshots

    - documentation

    - additional packages

- - development resources 

    - CVS

    - mailing lists

... etc.

>     Why not have an emacs.gnu.org website?
> 
> We want the web site for *every* GNU program to be on www.gnu.org; every time
> people think some other location is "the site" for a GNU program, that causes
> various headaches for us.  So our policy is that the site for FOO should be
> www.gnu.org/software/FOO.

Is the gcc.gnu.org site a deprecated policy?

I personally think it is a good idea.  It allows the project to have a strong
presence but also signifies that it is part of the larger GNU project.

>     There is this:
> 
>     http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
> 
>     but there really isn't much there.  I think we could do better! :)
> 
> I agree completely.  We don't want to change the location, but it would be
> very good to improve the contents.

We could keep the current location working.  We would just redir to
http://emacs.gnu.org

If we are not in agreement we could postpone the discussion for later.

> Would you like to work on adding more info to the pages?

I will take a shot at it tonight.

I want to use the Apache .shtml inclusion mechanism.  This way I can have a the
navbar as one isolated file.

Any objections to this?

Kevin

- -- 
Kevin A. Burton ( address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden )
             Location - San Francisco, CA, Cell - 415.595.9965
        Jabber - address@hidden,  Web - http://relativity.yi.org/

For evil to win, is for good men to do nothing.
       - Winston Churchill.
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