Re: Doco needs landing

[David Crossley <cr...@indexgeo.com.au>]

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> David Crossley wrote:
>
> > Mmmm, i am not sure that i like this approach. "Doco" sounds
> > to me like one of the reasons that "Forrest" was started.
> 
> that's right, but forrest took a different path and now focuses
> on static generation of web sites, full blown content management
> is not at reach there anymore.

That is a rash statement from afar.

Forrest was started by some visionaries with grand plans.
After a very short while, most of those people disappeared
and only a few committers remained to assist the fledgling.

Forrest documentation still talked about the grander plans.
Brilliant though it is, Forrest had to pull its horns in,
as it was not yet delivering on that vision.

So certain dreams had to be "shelved". Not abandoned, just put on
hold until there were participants, and real use cases to meet.

There were also recent cases where some new committers started to
set up some default facilities which assumed a servlet environment
and thereby broke the static docs build. We decided that the
primary focus be static, yet enable project-specific dynamic.

--David

Re: Doco needs landing

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

On 1 Dec 2003, at 03:27, David Crossley wrote:

> Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>> David Crossley wrote:
>>
>>> Mmmm, i am not sure that i like this approach. "Doco" sounds
>>> to me like one of the reasons that "Forrest" was started.
>>
>> that's right, but forrest took a different path and now focuses
>> on static generation of web sites, full blown content management
>> is not at reach there anymore.
>
> That is a rash statement from afar.
>
> Forrest was started by some visionaries with grand plans.
> After a very short while, most of those people disappeared
> and only a few committers remained to assist the fledgling.
>
> Forrest documentation still talked about the grander plans.
> Brilliant though it is, Forrest had to pull its horns in,
> as it was not yet delivering on that vision.
>
> So certain dreams had to be "shelved". Not abandoned, just put on
> hold until there were participants, and real use cases to meet.
>
> There were also recent cases where some new committers started to
> set up some default facilities which assumed a servlet environment
> and thereby broke the static docs build. We decided that the
> primary focus be static, yet enable project-specific dynamic.

one of the main goals of doco is to have 'zero codebase'... it's only a 
  plan, a vision, an architecture and a lot of configuration file. There 
will be no *technical* overlap with the projects, doco is just a 
project to "eat our dog food", shelving certain dreams in order to make 
them come true.

It is true that forrest was started with that idea in mind, but later 
turned out that people wanted to use it for their own stuff and it was 
hard to keep goals in synch since a common denominator was needed.

instead of fighting to lock forrest down, I decided to step out and let 
it grow.

Now, I'm back on the original dream that started in 1998: writing a 
document management system (some people called it a "distributed word 
processor") for our projects and use it as a testbase for further 
research on the semantic web.

This *does not* overlap with any other project out there: no project is 
focused on a single implementation and installation, but they are 
focusing on writing reusable software.

SoC: Doco uses and glues pieces, the projects build the pieces and 
receive back from Doco what they can incorporate in the general pieces.

This is my goal, but of course, I'm wide open to suggestions on how to 
make things easier for everybody.

--
Stefano.