Paul recently posted
"All Developers, please read", a very strong insight into the transition the LMCE project is making from Paul's solo forking effort, with a little help, into a real community project. But a lot of the knowledge of how the code works architecturally is still locked up inside Paul. Paul is very busy with the technical work, even while opening it to a team effort, and claims he's not the right person to write docs even with a lot of free time available. But he is available to answer questions, though he wants a system to keep him from being inundated. And we've got a "community liason" in danielk, suiting Paul's needs for someone to filter the rest of the project.
We still need a way to use that structure to get the community to share Paul's expertise, so we can help with the project ourselves (and help ourselves to it). We need to be able to formulate questions so Paul can turn around answers, especially questions of how to map features to the code that supports those features. Like "which code gets called when the 'rip all' button is pressed in the Orbiter GUI, that calls the scripts that do the ripping, DB updating, etc?"
A good protocol might be simply for people to discuss in this developers forum whatever problems we're working on, until they slam up against some undocumented code in that map we'd like to have. Then someone in that discussion can offer to ask that question of the "gurus". Once the thread agrees on the actual question to ask, someone can post that question in a sticky "Ask Paul" thread. danielk can subscribe to that thread, collect questions, answer those he can do without Paul's help, and then get Paul to answer. Either through danielk replying, or Paul can of course reply directly. The person getting the answer could dump the answer into the wiki, in a "How It Works" section of a given feature's page, to make the most of the help for everyone. That would be a good "community liason". People who want to help out with documentation can cruise that "Ask Paul" thread, looking for answers to put in the wiki, and to clean up the wiki.
That whole process is informal, and anyone can cut through it if they want and can. But it would make things go a lot faster for everyone. danielk, maybe Paul, can you work with that? Can we all work with that?
