CLT2007, LiMux, Where Documentation Really Belongs

Last Weekend, KDE had a booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007, one of the best Open Source / Free Software Community events that I am aware of. I went over to Chemnitz with my LUG friends and was warmly welcomed by my friends and hosts Antje, Daniel and KF.

The booth was staffed with a lot of well known developers like Alex Neundorf of CMake fame as well as fresh blood like Bernhard Schiffner, who did not only volunteer to help out on the booth but also brought some additional hardware and a precompiled KDE 4 which we happily showed off. If you are a KDE lover and want to support KDE, follow Bernhards example and subscribe to KDE-Promo to help your local promo team.

The most discussed topic was the Dolphin vs. Konqueror that also caused quite some heat on the Dot. Another FAQ revolved around our choice against Beryl or Compiz as the default Window Manager in KDE 4. The reason is fairly simple: Both only work on modern hardware and with modern drivers. They are also not as well integrated in KDE 4 as KWin is, and it would be hard to get them there in some particular areas (think KIOSK). On the other hand, KDE 4 will support Beryl or Compiz just as well, so if you feel like using them, there is nothing in your way. Also let me point out that KWin maintainer Lubos Lunak (sorry for the spelling Lubos, not Unicode keyboard available) is working on some eyecandy in KWin, which he already blogged about.

But lets return to my little report: On Sunday, I gave fairly well attended two hour workshop on Qt 4 programming, which was very well received. I also had a couple of interesting meetings with several people. I might blog about some of them later. Most interesting for the purpose of this blog entry was the discussions I had with the people from LiMux (Linux in Munich). They were very interested when they learned about TechBase.

This is pretty much what I hoped for: The technical staff within the LiMux project is pretty much the combination of System Integrators and administrators that had a hard time to figure out KDE detail and they still have. However, there is hope now: Everything can be easily documented. Also there was one particular plea that I’d like to forward to all KDE developers: Don’t hide documentation in Subversion. No real word user will ever be looking there. Noone, really. Storing documentation in Subversion, even if it is not strictly general purpose documentation, is the best way to get people annoyed with your software, since they usually use packaged software. Use TechBase and don’t be shy to create new documentation. If you don’t feel confident about where to store new documents: Don’t despair! A lot of people are monitoring changes on TechBase and will put the articles where they belong.