New Core documentation workflow

Categories: Development, Documentation Created by François Suter
Usage of ReStructured Text for all official manuals enables an improved documentation workflow.
All the official documentation has been migrated from OpenOffice to ReStructured Text. This means that it is now far easier to contribute to a manual, since we are dealing with plain text files. This opens up the possibility to submit documentation patches, just like TYPO3 Core patches. Furthermore we also moved away from SVN and each official manual now has its own Git repository and Gerrit review queue. The Documentation Team and the Core Team thus discussed a new workflow for TYPO3 Core patches that imply documentation changes. Our practice currently includes opening a related documentation issue in the relevant manual's bug tracker on Forge. From now on it is requested to also submit a documentation patch and push it to Gerrit. The patch must be marked with:
"Depends: ChangeIdComesHere" 
where the Change Id used is the one from the Core patch. Should the Core patch be abandoned, the documentation patch will be dropped too. Don't worry about the documentation not being too good. The Documentation Team will take care of improving both language and content if necessary. The most important thing with this new workflow is to avoid forgetting updates to the documentation and having the patches ready up front. As we plan to have nightly builds of the ReStructured Text files for the official manuals, it may mean in the near future that we have documentation that is always in sync with the source code. I hope you will agree that this is worth the effort.