[MPlayer-dev-eng] documentation policy

[Diego Biurrun]

Please ignore my first message on the subject, I accidentally hit the
send message keys..

There two points I would like to raise:

Kim Minh asked on -users some days ago whether he could/should touch
the DOCS/ directory.  Just to clarify this: Everybody with CVS write
access has write access to the DOCS/ directory as well.  This used to
be different in the past, but it has changed now.  Write access means
write access everywhere.  Furthermore the DOCS/ directory is not out
of bounds either.  Please do feel free to commit updates, fixes,
additions whenever you would like to.  I would really like to
encourage everybody to do this.  Don't be afraid to make mistakes,
either, I will gladly correct them.

Over the past months we have moved from one documentation maintainer
to a team of documentation maintainers, but I believe we have to take
this notion one step further.  Gabucino has very little net connection
atm (IIRC), I am buried in work, studies and whatnot, Jonas is doing a
great job on the man page, but still the ToDo-list is growing and not
shrinking.  In short, we need to distribute this on more shoulders.  I
would therefore like to propose that we start some sort of
documentation policy.  All developers should aim to keep the docs up
to date when they add options or modify existing ones.  We could also
ask this of people sending in patches and add it to patches.txt.  The
point is that if XYZ adds some option to MPlayer extending the man
page by a few lines, this should not take XYZ more than a few minutes
and be an accurate description.  In contrast, if I (or one of the
other docs maintainers) try to do this, I will have to RTFS (and
understand) and maybe also ask google, the mailing lists or on IRC.
This can easily take 2 hours and I have to try to keep up with a whole
bunch of developers...  Maybe this does not need to be a strict rule,
but I think it should at least be encouraged.  It does not have to be
a big deal, as I said above I will be more than willing to improve or
correct additions, but there should be something to begin with.

Please let me know what you think about this.

Diego