openSUSE talk:Home for developers strategy proposal

As I noted in this opensuse Forum thread one thing I would like to see, as a volunteer for providing support, is some sort of guidance provided by the developers (and the packagers) to the support volunteers , in providing guidance so that the support volunteers can document the way things are done for basic user support.

I constantly find myself reverse engineering (to a limited extent) what has been done, in order to understand enough to write a wiki, or some sort of guide.

This is true not only for the developers, but also wrt the packagers, who play a key roll in repackaging the developers' applications, so that regular users can use the package. Sometimes how the application is packaged by a packager, can have an important impact on how the application functions.

Now if the developers/packagers will write all of the wiki/guides, then there is less need for such a guidance/communication to volunteers like me (as the wiki/guide created by the developer/packager provides all the information). ... but somehow I think the developers and packagers do not want to write the wiki ....

So, the question in my mind, is how do we BETTER go about this ? How do we ensure there is a downstream flow of information, instead of a forced upstream reverse engineering learning (which is what happens now to a certain extent) ?

oldcpu

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I would think that "Home for developers" would more likely be a subgoal of "Home for end users" than a strategy by itself (it could be a derivative distro, for example).

vuntz