Many of us are familiar with GNOME, one of the best desktop environments for Linux, preferred by many users for its easy-to-use and highly customizable nature.
All of that is made possible thanks to the numerous contributors that work on the GNOME project to provide a very seamless experience across GNOME and its applications.
But, there was an issue that has been plaguing the project for quite some time now, and that is the issue of sub-par project documentation that was found to be either inaccurate or redundant on many occasions.
Luckily, Allan Day from the GNOME Project has announced something really cool that is all set to change how contributors get access to important information pertaining to the project.
Called the GNOME Project Handbook (handbook.gnome.org), it is meant to act as a one-stop documentation resource for GNOME contributors, and not for providing user documentation, homepages for apps/libraries, or technical documentation.
This website features plenty of content from the existing wiki, with most of them being improved, and a considerable amount of original content too. Plus, as you can see above, there are many sections that cater to different use cases.
There's a page called “Get in Touch” for getting info on the official communication channels of the GNOME project. Next, a page for “Governance” that explains how decisions are taken in the project, and a page called “Infrastructure” for details on the infrastructure of GNOME and more.
The GNOME Project Handbook is maintained similar to how most GNOME projects are handled; by using a GitLab repository to manage it, with issues to be reported, and changes to be merged via merge requests.
The ultimate goal of all these sites is to replace the outdated GNOME Wiki, which is showing its age. Allan recommends contributors switch to using the handbook and do away with the wiki going forward, as they plan to retire the wiki in the near future.
For further reading, I suggest you go through the announcement blog to learn more about this undertaking.
💬 Will you be using the GNOME Project Handbook? Or did you prefer using the old wiki?
Ankush Das
