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[Andy Robinson]

2008/10/20 Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de>:

> Very well explained! Wikis have been suggested repeatedly

> starting as long as eight years ago, maybe.


Dinu, you forget that we set one up, and NOBODY except you
used it. I think you added a few headings for others to fill in.
Then we had to take
it down when it got abused; it wasn't worth having an employee
check it every few hours for abuse, or tighten up the security, when
it was getting zero real use.  Also,
each time you raised this on lists over several years, I said
"OK, who's going to contribute some documentation?" and
got no volunteers.

This time round, someone has volunteered to help with the
manuals, which is great (thanks, Peter!); and several others
are sending us patches regularly, which is a fantastic development.
We will do our best to reinforce these efforts.    But we do not,
at this time, have a writer/editor on our staff with the time
and the product knowledge to "lead" a wiki and get it off the
ground.



> ReportLab Ltd.

> still cultivates its fear and wrong perceptions of losing

> control over its baby.


Of course we would prefer control.  We are a commercial business and
this is our core asset.

If you are referring to deciding to keep our docs versioned along with our
source rather than in a Wiki or FLOSSManuals, well, that's an
engineering decision
primarily stemming from the fact that our self-generating manuals are
the biggest
functional test cases we have; and because we think we can make them
into very good tutorials on "how to publish a nice manual" over time, which
is of wide interest.

If you really believe a more open, bazaar-type approach would cause
a million flowers to bloom, feel free to set up wikis or a FLOSSManual with our
full blessing, or even to fork the code and maintain it yourself.  I would be
delighted if it worked, as it would save us a lot of time.  But I have
not yet seen
the evidence that people outside ReportLab want to do long-term maintenance
work or documentation on this library, so we will continue to use the
tools which suit us.

Best Regards,


Andy