On 2020-06-05 00:48:42 +0200 (+0200), Thomas Goirand wrote: [...]
Back at the time, the decision was made because some core contributors to the install guide just left the project.
It wasn't just "some core contributors to the install guide" but rather the entirety of the documentation team, or very nearly so. The one or two people who remained barely had time to help maintain tooling around generating documentation and no time whatsoever to review content.
It was at the time said that moving the maintenance to each individual projects would scale nicer.
It scaled at least as well as the alternative, which was no longer updating the documentation at all. There were calls for help over many months, in lots of places, and yet no new volunteers stepped forward to take up the task.
I am now convince that this is the exact opposite that has happened: docs are maintained a lot less now, with lower quality, and less uniformity. So I am convince that we did a very bad move at the time, one that we shouldn't have made. [...]
Less documentation maintenance was inevitable no matter what choice was made. The employer of basically all the technical writers in the OpenStack community decided there were better places for it to focus that time and money. The only people left who could write and review documentation were the developers in each project. The task fell on them not because they wanted it, but because there was no one else. That they often don't find a lot of time to devote to documentation is unsurprising, and in that regard representative of most open source software communities I've ever known. -- Jeremy Stanley