[wp-hackers] Re: Re: phpDocumentor

[Rich Bowen]

On Jul 6, 2006, at 05:49, Christian Barmala wrote:

>
> So let me guess what I'm supposed to read into that: Isn't WordPress
> supposed to be a community project? How can a single person void  
> the whole
> communities opinion? ... or did I get something wrong?
>

There are many ways to run Open Source/Free Software projects.  
Wordpress leans towards the "Benevolent dictator" model, whereas  
other projects, such as PHP, for example, with 1000+ committers, lean  
towards the true democracy model. Most other projects fall somewhere  
in the middle. So whether it is "supposed to be a community project"  
is not really the issue. The issue is exactly how this particular  
community project governs itself, which may be somewhat different  
from your expectations, if you've ever been involved in other f/oss  
projects.
>
>
> Some of the posts in the above discussion suggested to maintain two  
> versions
> e.g. a commented developer edition and a white space stripped runtime
> edition or Matt's edition and a documented community edition or a  
> separate
> documentation. I don't like this idea, because maintaining two  
> versions is
> an extra overhead and they can easily get out of sync especially if  
> there is
> resistance against one of them.


While it is certainly possible to automatically strip out  
documentation when a release is made, leading on only one version,  
but two downloadable releases, I tend to agree that even this  
approach is pretty silly. I think many of us are in agreement with  
your assessment, there are essentially two possible approaches.  
First, the one that most of us have taken, which is to quit caring,  
since we've received the veto from the top of the food chain. Second,  
a development fork, is an approach that (I think) two folks have  
taken, and moved off in their own directions. Sure, keeping in sync  
is a pain, but that's what svn is for.


Rich Bowen
rbowen at rcbowen.com