Hi all,
I have recently gone through the process of publishing documentation for AeroGear Digger to
aerogear.org.
The process for adding docs for digger was as follows:
- Make changes on Feature Branch over a period of time.
- At some point merge lots of commits (difficult to review) from Feature Branch to master.
- At some point merge master (again with lots of commits) to production branch
- This publishes to
aerogear.org (build needs to be manually triggered)
Out of this we attempted to improve the process by adding development steps to the README [1] outlining that
-> each change should be verified on it's own -> merged to master -> and then merged to production
removing the wait time and merges which involved lots of commits and changes.
I think there are a few things we can do to make this better. (simpler)
1) How?
Remove the production branch (and related steps) altogether.
Why?
- All this documentation is done in the open.
- All branches are visible to all users/developers.
- Changes can be verified locally by building the website using the steps in the README [2] before being merged to master.
2) How?
Automate the publishing of the site
Why?
Right now the building of the site has to be triggered manually via a Jenkins instance on cloudbees. If we remove production and enforce that all changes are fully verified before being merged to master then we can automate that any new changes are published immediately once merged to master.
3) How?
Add some sort of versioning to the documentation. This could be in the form of tagging the repo once we have a release of a product.
Why?
If we are always publishing docs once a change is made to the product then we should version the documentation so we know which version of the docs matches older versions of the product.
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I'm really interested in some feedback on this. Let me know what you think. Is there a better/simpler way to do it than I suggested?
