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List:       fedora-docs-list
Subject:    Re: Proposal: Adopt an AsciiBinder Based ToolChain
From:       Brian Exelbierd <bex () pobox ! com>
Date:       2016-09-26 16:52:39
Message-ID: 50E7F8B0-8BBD-40CD-BFB0-8FE55B727998 () pobox ! com
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> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016, at 06:08 PM, Zach Oglesby wrote:
> My personal opinion on this is that while asciibinder is easier to setup and get \
> running, it puts us at the mercy of a few teams inside of Red Hat again. While I \
> may be misremembering the past, I recall Publican being much more widely used than \
> you seem to, but over time it lost ground to other tools and the team working on it \
> got smaller. The same thing will happen if the teams working on asciibinder move \
> on. 

I respect your opinion and I note that I came in at the end of publican's life, not \
during it's heyday.

One thing that attracts me to AsciiBinder is that it is used by communities, albeit \
many with strong RH contribution, and not just inside of RH.  In fact, AsciiBinder is \
not currently used inside of RH at all, as far as I know.  I have also met at least \
one non-RH group and non-RH dominant community that uses AsciiBinder.  This plus the \
relative simplicity of the tool make me optimistic about its future.

I also believe that we are choosing tools for the next few years, not the next \
decade.  I think that this space is changing a lot and that agility is more important \
than trying be on the same toolchain over an extended period of time.  

Additionally, AsciiDoc seems to open up a world of tooling options to us and reduces \
our risk of dependency on anyone, RH or Shaun.  Anecdotally, AsciiDoc also appears to \
recharge contributing communities.

Therefore, even if we as a community decide to go with pintail, I think it is \
critical that we both migrate to AsciiDoc as soon as possible and get something \
running by Fedora 26.  Ultimately our docs are only as good as our contributor count. \
We must make all efforts to get an easier contribution workflow in place immediately.

> On the other hand, Shaun's career has been built on making tools for documentation; \
> he was hired by Red Hat becuase of this. While it is ture that he is currently the \
> only one working on pintail, he has a better understanding of documention life \
> cycle becuase of the length of time he has been working in this domain. I do not \
> see a diffrence between a team of people working on Red Hat products commiting to a \
> tool as better than one person working on somthing that he is passionate about and \
> has a proven track record on. I would much rather be reliant on Shuan's work than \
> the whims of another team inside of Red Hat. I get that we are not making a lot of \
> progress moving to pintail, but it is my opinion that in the long run it is the \
> better tool. 

While Shaun's career may have been built on tooling, I don't believe he or anyone \
else is omniscient.  I don't think Fedora is in a position to be the first or an \
early adopter of this tooling.  AsciiBinder and other toolchains have had greater \
adoption so far and therefore more people have hit and fixed the bugs.

Going back to my earlier comments, would it be worthwhile to "kick the ball down the \
field" with AsciiBinder or another tool? We can always change to pintail if that is a \
better choice down the road.

regards,

bex
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